Securing Systems Against External Programs

• Authors: Brant Hashii;Manoj Lal;Raju Pandey;Steven Samorodin
• Venue: IEEE Internet Computing
• Year: 1998

Internet users routinely and often unknowingly download and run programs, such as Java applets; and some Web servers let users upload external programs and run them on the server. Although the practice of executing these external programs has the sanction of widespread use, its security implications haven't yet been systematically addressed. In the brief, dynamic history of the Internet, such a situation is not unusual. New communication mechanisms and computing paradigms are often implemented before the security issues they engender have been rigorously analyzed. Our goal is to address this problem in the subdomain of external programs by systematically outlining security issues and classifying current solutions. Our focus is solely on protecting a host from external programs. We do not address the problem of protecting the communication medium or protecting an external program from runtime systems. Furthermore, we do not address the problem of correctly identifying the source of an external program (authentication). We start our inquiry by reviewing the relevant models of computation, followed by an overview of the security problems associated with them. We then classify both the problems and the existing solutions using a resource-centric model that distinguishes problems associated with resource access from those associated with resource consumption. Finally, we classify solutions to each problem according to how and when they are applied