Secure information release in timed automata

One of the key demands of cyberphysical systems is that they meet their safety goals. Timed automata has established itself as a formalism for modeling and analyzing the real-time safety aspects of cyberphysical systems. Increasingly it is also demanded that cyberphysical systems meet a number of security goals for confidentiality and integrity.

Notions of security based on Information flow control, such as non-interference, provide strong guarantees that no information is leaked; however, many cyberphysical systems leak intentionally some information in order to achieve their purposes. In this paper, we develop a formal approach of information flow for timed automata that allows intentional information leaks.

The security of a timed automaton is then defined using a bisimulation relation that takes account of the non-determinism and the clocks of timed automata. Finally, we define an algorithm that traverses a timed automaton and imposes information flow constraints on it and we prove that our algorithm is sound with respect to our security notion.