Effect: An operational view mechanism for decentralized information flow control

Flume, which implements decentralized information flow control (DIFC), allows a high security level process to "pre-create" secret files in a low security level directory. However, the pre-create mechanism makes some normal system calls unavailable, and moreover, it needs priori knowledge to create a large quantity of objects, which is difficult to estimate in practical operating systems. In this paper, we present an extended Flume file access control mechanism, named Effect, to substitute the mechanism of pre-create, which permits write operations (create, delete, and rename a file) on directories and creates a file access virtual layer that allocates operational views for each process with noninterference properties. In the end, we further present an analysis on the security of Effect. Our work makes it easier for multi-user to share confidential information in decentralized information flow control systems.