Title
Retrofitting legacy code for authorization policy enforcement
Abstract
Researchers have argued that the best way to construct a secure system is to proactively integrate security into the design of the system. However, this tenet is rarely followed because of economic and practical considerations. Instead, security mechanisms are added as the need arises, by retrofitting legacy code. Existing techniques to do so are manual and ad hoc, and often result in security holes. We present program analysis techniques to assist the process of retrofitting legacy code for authorization policy enforcement. These techniques can be used to retrofit legacy servers, such as X window, Web, proxy, and cache servers. Because such servers manage multiple clients simultaneously, and offer shared resources to clients, they must have the ability to enforce authorization policies. A developer can use our techniques to identify security-sensitive locations in legacy servers, and place reference monitor calls to mediate these locations. We demonstrate our techniques by retrofitting the X11 server to enforce authorization policies on its X clients
Year
DOI
Venue
2006
10.1109/SP.2006.34
Retrofitting legacy code for authorization policy enforcement
Keywords
Field
DocType
authorization,authorisation,resource management,program analysis,fingerprint recognition,software maintenance,security,linux
Resource management,Retrofitting,Computer security,Computer science,Cache,Server,Legacy code,Reference monitor,Program analysis,Software maintenance
Conference
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
1081-6011
25
1.00
References 
Authors
58
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Vinod Ganapathy171342.69
T Jaeger22635255.67
S. Jha37921539.19