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Opacity generalised to transition systems

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Abstract

Recently, opacity has proved a promising technique for describing security properties. Much of the work has been couched in terms of Petri nets. Here, we extend the notion of opacity to the model of labelled transition systems and generalise opacity in order to better represent concepts from the literature on information flow. In particular, we establish links between opacity and the information flow concepts of anonymity and non-inference. We also investigate ways of verifying opacity when working with Petri nets. Our work is illustrated by two examples, one describing anonymity in a commercial context, and the other modelling requirements upon a simple voting system.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computing Science, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7RU, UK

    Jeremy W. Bryans, Maciej Koutny & Peter Y. A. Ryan

  2. Laboratoire VERIMAG 2, av. de Vignates, Gières, France

    Laurent Mazaré

Authors
  1. Jeremy W. Bryans
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  2. Maciej Koutny
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  3. Laurent Mazaré
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  4. Peter Y. A. Ryan
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Correspondence to Jeremy W. Bryans.

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Bryans, J.W., Koutny, M., Mazaré, L. et al. Opacity generalised to transition systems. Int. J. Inf. Secur. 7, 421–435 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10207-008-0058-x

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