TY - CONF T1 - Fable: A Language for Enforcing User-defined Security Policies T2 - IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, 2008. SP 2008 Y1 - 2008 A1 - Swamy,N. A1 - Corcoran,B.J. A1 - Hicks, Michael W. KW - Access control KW - Automata KW - Collaborative work KW - Communication system security KW - Computer languages KW - computer security KW - Data security KW - enforcement policy KW - FABLE KW - Government KW - high-level security goals KW - information flow KW - Information security KW - Language-based security KW - programming languages KW - Programming profession KW - provenance KW - security automata KW - security labels KW - security of data KW - user-defined security policies KW - verified enforcement KW - Web programming language AB - This paper presents FABLE, a core formalism for a programming language in which programmers may specify security policies and reason that these policies are properly enforced. In FABLE, security policies can be expressed by associating security labels with the data or actions they protect. Programmers define the semantics of labels in a separate part of the program called the enforcement policy. FABLE prevents a policy from being circumvented by allowing labeled terms to be manipulated only within the enforcement policy; application code must treat labeled values abstractly. Together, these features facilitate straightforward proofs that programs implementing a particular policy achieve their high-level security goals. FABLE is flexible enough to implement a wide variety of security policies, including access control, information flow, provenance, and security automata. We have implemented FABLE as part of the LINKS web programming language; we call the resulting language SELlNKS. We report on our experience using SELlNKS to build two substantial applications, a wiki and an on-line store, equipped with a combination of access control and provenance policies. To our knowledge, no existing framework enables the enforcement of such a wide variety of security policies with an equally high level of assurance. JA - IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, 2008. SP 2008 PB - IEEE SN - 978-0-7695-3168-7 M3 - 10.1109/SP.2008.29 ER -