Language extensions for specifying program access control policies in programming languages

  • Authors:
  • Billy G. Claybrook;H.Rex Hartson

  • Affiliations:
  • The MITRE Corporation U.S.A.;Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University U.S.A.

  • Venue:
  • Journal of Systems and Software
  • Year:
  • 1983

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Abstract

The scope rules in programming languages control the sharing of data among program units, e.g., blocks and procedures. Typically, scope rules provide an all-or-nothing kind of access control. A wide range of programming problems exist which require finer access control as well as considerable sophistication for the implementation of access control policies on high-level data objects such as files. This paper presents a number of language extensions that permit the programmer to specify the degree of access control for each abstract object that a program can manipulate. The number of extensions has been kept as small as possible, while allowing the user to specify conveniently the access control policies that he desires. Some of the extensions permit access policies to be specified such that access correctness can be completely determined at compile time; other extensions permit policies to be specified that require some access checking to be done at run-time in order to ensure access correctness.