Enforcing Distributed Information Flow Policies Architecturally: The SAID Approach

Architectural security of a distributed system is best considered at design time rather than further down the software life cycle where it may become very expensive to make even minor modifications to the software architecture. In this paper we take Architectural Interaction Diagrams (AID) [9,8], an architecture description framework with an unique ability to encode communication efficiently and augment actions of AID components with security levels to produce SAID. This new architecture description language enables the designer to impose information flow restriction policies on system communications at design time which in turn allows a reduction of the information flow analysis problem for distributed systems to the simpler problem of information flow analysis of individual components of the distributed system.