Title
Access rights analysis for Java
Abstract
Java 2 has a security architecture that protects systems from unauthorized access by mobile or statically configured code. The problem is in manually determining the set of security access rights required to execute a library or application. The commonly used strategy is to execute the code, note authorization failures, allocate additional access rights, and test again. This process iterates until the code successfully runs for the test cases in hand. Test cases usually do not cover all paths through the code, so failures can occur in deployed systems. Conversely, a broad set of access rights is allocated to the code to prevent authorization failures from occurring. However, this often leads to a violation of the "Principle of Least Privilege"This paper presents a technique for computing the access rights requirements by using a context sensitive, flow sensitive, interprocedural data flow analysis. By using this analysis, we compute at each program point the set of access rights required by the code. We model features such as multi-threading, implicitly defined security policies, the semantics of the Permission.implies method and generation of a security policy description. We implemented the algorithms and present the results of our analysis on a set of programs. While the analysis techniques described in this paper are in the context of Java code, the basic techniques are applicable to access rights analysis issues in non-Java-based systems.
Year
DOI
Venue
2002
10.1145/583854.582452
Special Interest Group on Programming Languages
Keywords
Field
DocType
Java security,access rights,call graph,data flow analysis,invocation graph,security
Computer access control,Programming language,Principle of least privilege,Computer science,Computer security,Data-flow analysis,Test case,Security policy,Enterprise information security architecture,Java,Code Access Security
Conference
Volume
Issue
ISSN
37
11
0362-1340
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
1-58113-471-1
62
4.75
References 
Authors
16
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Larry Koved121640.91
Marco Pistoia289658.12
Aaron Kershenbaum381896.80