Information hiding

Summary

In computer science, information hiding is the principle of segregation of the design decisions in a computer program that are most likely to change, thus protecting other parts of the program from extensive modification if the design decision is changed. The protection involves providing a stable interface which protects the remainder of the program from the implementation (whose details are likely to change). Written in another way, information hiding is the ability to prevent certain aspects of a class or software component from being accessible to its clients, using either programming language features (like private variables) or an explicit exporting policy. Overview The term encapsulation is often used interchangeably with information hiding. Not all agree on the distinctions between the two, though; one may think of information hiding as being the principle and encapsulation being the technique. A software module hides information by encapsulating the information int

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_hiding

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This course provides attendees with theoretical and practical issues in media security. In addition to lectures by the professor, the course includes laboratory sessions, a mini-project, and a mid-term exam.

This advanced course will provide students with the knowledge to tackle the design of privacy-preserving ICT systems. Students will learn about existing technologies to prect privacy, and how to evaluate the protection they provide.

The course introduces the foundations on which programs and programming languages are built. It introduces syntax, types and semantics as building blocks that together define the properties of a program part or a language. Students will learn how to apply these concepts in their reasoning.

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Abstract Data Types Are Under Full Control with Ada 9X

Ada 83 did not provide enough control on the creation, assignment, and destruction of objects of user-defined types. This lack of control restricted type composition and prevented the full exercise of information hiding on Abstract Data Types. Ada 9X brings new mechanisms supporting the full control of Abstract Data Types, powerful type composition, and more extensive information hiding. With better control of Abstract Data Types, Ada code will be easier to write, understand, and reuse. Thus, applications written in Ada 9X will be safer. Keywords: Abstract data types, Information hiding, Ada 9X, Object initialization, User-defined Assignment, Object finalization, Memory Reclamation, Reference counting, Type composition.

ACM Press1994

Control-Flow Hijacking attacks are the dominant attack vector against C/C++ programs. Control-Flow Integrity (CFI) solutions mitigate these attacks on the forward edge, i.e., indirect calls through function pointers and virtual calls. Protecting the backward edge is left to stack canaries, which are easily bypassed through information leaks. Shadow Stacks are a fully precise mechanism for protecting backwards edges, and should be deployed with CFI mitigations. We present a comprehensive analysis of all possible shadow stack mechanisms along three axes: performance, compatibility, and security. For performance comparisons we use SPEC CPU2006, while security and compatibility are qualitatively analyzed. Based on our study, we renew calls for a shadow stack design that leverages a dedicated register, resulting in low performance overhead, and minimal memory overhead, but sacrifices compatibility. We present case studies of our implementation of such a design, Shadesmar, on Phoronix and Apache to demonstrate the feasibility of dedicating a general purpose register to a security monitor on modern architectures, and Shadesmar's deployability. Our comprehensive analysis, including detailed case studies for our novel design, allows compiler designers and practitioners to select the correct shadow stack design for different usage scenarios. Shadow stacks belong to the class of defense mechanisms that require metadata about the program's state to enforce their defense policies. Protecting this metadata for deployed mitigations requires in-process isolation of a segment of the virtual address space. Prior work on defenses in this class has relied on information hiding to protect metadata. We show that stronger guarantees are possible by repurposing two new Intel x86 extensions for memory protection (MPX), and page table control (MPK). Building on our isolation efforts with MPX and MPK, we present the design requirements for a dedicated hardware mechanism to support intra-process memory isolation, and discuss how such a mechanism can empower the next wave of highly precise software security mitigations that rely on partially isolated information in a process.

IEEE COMPUTER SOC2019

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Pattern matching enables inspecting algebraic data types, but typically prevents hiding the implementation of the matched algebraic data type. In Scala, instead, extractors also allow pattern matching on non-algebraic data types and invoking methods on the obtained objects, while partially decoupling API consumers from the API implementation. But as we show in this paper, pattern matching using extractors is restricted compared to matching against case classes. We argue this violates the appropriate variant of the uniform access principle. To address this problem, we propose a small language extension, which enables defining truly abstract interfaces and freely evolve their implementation.

2018

IEEE COMPUTER SOC2019