An Architectural Refinement Approach Based on Trusted Channel in MLS Environment

ABSTRACT

Architectural refinement is an important approach to save the development costs and speed up the design and development progress. With the traditional research usually focusing on the refinement of functions and components, the additional information flow which is unsupervised generated during the refinement process and the possible loss of consistency of security structure are not considered thoroughly. This paper proposes an architectural refinement approach based on trusted channel working in MLS (Multi-Level Security) environment. Applying characteristics of trusted channel to the refinement of the functions and components in security structure, this paper takes the security issues of additional information flow and consistency of security structure problems arising in the process of refinement into account, and uses TCB (trusted computing base) extension to illustrate architectural refinement to obtain a hierarchical TCB. This paper also makes formal description of this approach and rules that must be followed in the process of applying it. And in the end, the security of this approach is proved using the noninterference model.

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