1. Process Coloring and DDFA Integration
Presenter: Ryan Riley
September 24, 2008
NICECAP PI Meeting

2. A Motivating Scenario PC false alert
turbotax
Tax
warcraft
Games
PC false alert
“Sensitive file should never leave this computer”
Editor
notepad
outlook
Sensitive
Date files
Tax files
My photo
File Manager
September 24, 2008
NICECAP PI Meeting

3. PC or DDFA Alone Cannot Solve It
 Process-level information flow treating processes as blackboxes
 Overly conservative color tainting
 Color tainting across processes
DDFA
 Language-level information flow confined within one process
 Not aware of colors across the system
 Fine-grain data flow tracking within a process
September 24, 2008
NICECAP PI Meeting

4. Example: Without “PC+DDFA” Integration
File 1
Process
Process
New file
File 2
September 24, 2008
NICECAP PI Meeting

5. Example: With “PC+DDFA” Integration
File 1
Process (w/ DDFA)
New file
New file
File 2
push_color(new_file, )
fetch_color(file1)
fetch_color(file2)
Process Coloring (Operating System level)
September 24, 2008
NICECAP PI Meeting

6. Example Scenario Tasks
SWRI+UTexas
Making DDFA color-aware
Instrumenting a real-world file manager PCManFM with DDFA capability
Purdue
Implementing fetch_color() and push_color() in PC
Testing instrumented PCManFM in living lab VM
Integration Meeting
September 8th, 2008 SwRI visited Purdue
September 24, 2008
NICECAP PI Meeting

7. PCManFM Sensitive Financial Information September 24, 2008
NICECAP PI Meeting

8. Flow Graphs Process Coloring Without DDFA 3 Colors – Bad.
September 24, 2008
NICECAP PI Meeting

9. Flow Graphs Process Coloring With DDFA 1 Color – Good.
September 24, 2008
NICECAP PI Meeting 9