Modular string-sensitive permission analysis with demand-driven precision

  • Authors:
  • Emmanuel Geay;Marco Pistoia; Takaaki Tateishi;Barbara G. Ryder;Julian Dolby

  • Affiliations:
  • IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, Hawthorne, NY, USA;IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, Hawthorne, NY, USA;IBM Tokyo Research Laboratory, Japan;Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, USA;IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, Hawthorne, NY, USA

  • Venue:
  • ICSE '09 Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Software Engineering
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

In modern software systems, programs are obtained by dynamically assembling components. This has made it necessary to subject component providers to access-control restrictions. What permissions should be granted to each component? Too few permissions may cause run-time authorization failures, too many constitute a security hole. We have designed and implemented a composite algorithm for precise static permission analysis for Java and the CLR. Unlike previous work, the analysis is modular and fully integrated with a novel slicing-based string analysis that is used to statically compute the string values defining a permission and disambiguate permission propagation paths. The results of our research prototype on production-level Java code support the effectiveness, practicality, and precision of our techniques, and show outstanding improvement over previous work.