Secure Composition of Insecure Components

  • Authors:

  • Peter Sewell;Jan Vitek

  • Affiliations:

  • -;-

  • Venue:
  • CSFW '99 Proceedings of the 12th IEEE workshop on Computer Security Foundations
  • Year:
  • 1999

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Abstract

Software systems are becoming heterogeneous: instead of a small number of large programs from well-established sources, a user's desktop may now consist of many smaller components that interact in intricate ways. Some components will be downloaded from the network from sources that are only partially trusted. A user would like to know that a number of security properties hold, e.g. that personal data is not leaked to the net, but it is typically infeasible to verify that such components are well-behaved. Instead, they must be executed in a secure environment, or wrapper, that provides fine-grain control of the allowable interactions between them, and between components and other system resources.In this paper we study such wrappers, focusing on how they can be expressed in a way that enables their security properties to be stated and proved rigorously. We introduce a model programming language, the box-pi calculus, that supports composition of software components and the enforcement of security policies. Several example wrappers are expressed using the calculus; we explore the delicate security properties they guarantee.