FlowR: Aspect Oriented Programming for Information Flow Control in Ruby Thomas F. J.-M. Pasquier Jean Bacon Brian Shand University of Cambridge Public Health England fthomas.pasquier,
[email protected] [email protected] Abstract Track, a taint-tracking system for Ruby, developed by the SafeWeb This paper reports on our experience with providing Information project [17]. Flow Control (IFC) as a library. Our aim was to support the use However, we came to realise certain limitations of the mech- of an unmodified Platform as a Service (PaaS) cloud infrastructure anisms we had deployed. For example, to enforce the required by IFC-aware web applications. We discuss how Aspect Oriented IFC policy, we manually inserted IFC checks at selected applica- Programming (AOP) overcomes the limitations of RubyTrack, our tion component boundaries. In practice, objects and classes are the first approach. Although use of AOP has been mentioned as a natural representation of application components within an object possibility in past IFC literature we believe this paper to be the oriented language and it seems natural to relate security concerns first illustration of how such an implementation can be attempted. with those objects. We should therefore associate the primitives and We discuss how we built FlowR (Information Flow Control for mechanisms to enforce IFC with selected objects. Furthermore, we Ruby), a library extending Ruby to provide IFC primitives using wish to be able to assign boundary checks on any class or object AOP via the Aquarium open source library. Previous attempts at without further development overhead. We also wish to be able providing IFC as a language extension required either modification to exploit the inheritance property to define rules that apply to of an interpreter or significant code rewriting.