Access rights analysis for Java

  • Authors:

  • Larry Koved;Marco Pistoia;Aaron Kershenbaum

  • Affiliations:

  • IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, New York;IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, New York;IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, New York

  • Venue:
  • OOPSLA '02 Proceedings of the 17th ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming, systems, languages, and applications
  • Year:
  • 2002

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Abstract

Java 2 has a security architecture that protects systems from unauthorized access by mobile or statically configured code. The problem is in manually determining the set of security access rights required to execute a library or application. The commonly used strategy is to execute the code, note authorization failures, allocate additional access rights, and test again. This process iterates until the code successfully runs for the test cases in hand. Test cases usually do not cover all paths through the code, so failures can occur in deployed systems. Conversely, a broad set of access rights is allocated to the code to prevent authorization failures from occurring. However, this often leads to a violation of the "Principle of Least Privilege"This paper presents a technique for computing the access rights requirements by using a context sensitive, flow sensitive, interprocedural data flow analysis. By using this analysis, we compute at each program point the set of access rights required by the code. We model features such as multi-threading, implicitly defined security policies, the semantics of the Permission.implies method and generation of a security policy description. We implemented the algorithms and present the results of our analysis on a set of programs. While the analysis techniques described in this paper are in the context of Java code, the basic techniques are applicable to access rights analysis issues in non-Java-based systems.