The need for capability policies

  • Authors:
  • Sophia Drossopoulou;James Noble

  • Affiliations:
  • Imperial College, London;Victoria University of Wellington

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 15th Workshop on Formal Techniques for Java-like Programs
  • Year:
  • 2013

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Abstract

The object-capability model is one of the industry standards adopted for the implementation of security policies for web-based software. Object-capabilities in various forms are supported by programming languages such as E, Joe-E, Newspeak, Grace, and the newer versions of Javascript. Unfortunately, code written using capabilities tends to concentrate on the low-level mechanism rather than the high-level policy. In this position paper, we argue that current specification methodologies cannot adequately capture all aspects of the capability policies required to support object-capability systems. We outline informally the features that such security policies should support, and we demonstrate (also informally) how we can reason that examples satisfy the capability policies.