Title
Efficient runtime-enforcement techniques for policy weaving
Abstract
Policy weaving is a program-transformation technique that rewrites a program so that it is guaranteed to be safe with respect to a stateful security policy. It utilizes (i) static analysis to identify points in the program at which policy violations might occur, and (ii) runtime checks inserted at such points to monitor policy state and prevent violations from occurring. The promise of policy weaving stems from the possibility of blending the best aspects of static and dynamic analysis components. Therefore, a successful instantiation of policy weaving requires a careful balance and coordination between the two. In this paper, we examine the strategy of using a combination of transactional introspection and statement indirection to implement runtime enforcement in a policy-weaving system. Transactional introspection allows the state resulting from the execution of a statement to be examined and, if the policy would be violated, suppressed. Statement indirection serves as a light-weight runtime analysis that can recognize and instrument dynamically generated code that is not available to the static analysis. These techniques can be implemented via static rewriting so that all possible program executions are protected against policy violations. We describe our implementation of transactional introspection and statement indirection for policy weaving, and report experimental results that show the viability of the approach in the context of real-world JavaScript programs executing in a browser.
Year
DOI
Venue
2014
10.1145/2635868.2635907
SIGSOFT FSE
Keywords
Field
DocType
security,dynamic runtime verification,security policy enforcement,verification,statement indirection,software/program verification,transactional introspection,speculative execution
Indirection,Weaving,Programming language,Speculative execution,Computer science,Static analysis,Real-time computing,Stateful firewall,Rewriting,Security policy,JavaScript
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
3
0.39
22
Authors
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Richard Joiner130.39
Thomas W. Reps275251040.21
S. Jha37921539.19
Mohan Dhawan419211.15
Vinod Ganapathy571342.69