Contributors

The IFC challenge is developed by Andrei Sabelfeld's research group at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden.

• Andrei Sabelfeld
• Benjamin Eriksson
• Arnar Birgisson

Testimonials

"The IFC challenge is a wonderful way of getting students to think about information leakage and type systems. I have been using it for teaching security both at University of Rennes and University of Copenhagen and it has always been very much appreciated. Cheers to the Chalmers group for sharing this entertaining and pedagogical tool with the community."
- Thomas Jensen, INRIA

"The IFC Challenge is a great way to help students understand the ins and out of information flow control, while having fun. By presenting increasingly complex languages and flawed type systems for information flow control, the challenge allows students to appreciate formalisms by asking them to identify practical attacks. The IFC Challenge is an important part of the language-based security module of my course, which students largely enjoy."
- Stefano Calzavara, Università Ca' Foscari Venezia

"We offer a Software Security course that covers software vulnerabilities and language based design of tools for building security into software. It brings in theoretical foundations of information flow, and we strive to integrate hands-on exercises that help tie these concepts with practical needs in security. We’ve been using the IFC Challenge for several years now, and this class is always a great hit. The students find excitement in understanding the intricacies of information flow dependencies and type based ways of stopping them. It also helps see that the same principles that hold for a toy language can also be applied to real world languages. Thank you for making it available!"
- Ana Almeida Matos, Instituto Superior Técnico, Lisbon

"The IFC challenge is an excellent pedagogical tool for quickly building intuition about threat models and covert channels. I use it regularly in my teaching, and students find it valuable and fun!"
- Aslan Askarov, Aarhus University

"These challenges combine theory and practice very naturally. A powerful pedagogical tool to boost students' interest in information flow control."
- Musard Balliu, KTH Royal Institute of Technology

Acknowledgments

We are thankful to several people for their contributions, feedback, and bug reports: Mohammad M. Ahmadpanah, Stefano Calzavara, Pontus Eriksson, Oscar Evertsson, Rune T. Fiedler, Jesper Jaxing, Daniel Hedin, Alexander Sjösten, Sandro Stucki, Terkel K. Tolstrup