From Stack Inspection to Access Control: A Security Analysis for Libraries

  • Authors:
  • Frederic Besson;Tomasz Blanc;Cedric Fournet;Andrew D. Gordon

  • Affiliations:
  • Microsoft Research;INRIA Rocquencourt;Microsoft Research;Microsoft Research

  • Venue:
  • CSFW '04 Proceedings of the 17th IEEE workshop on Computer Security Foundations
  • Year:
  • 2004

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Abstract

We present a new static analysis for reviewing the securityof libraries for systems, such as JVMs or the CLR,that rely on stack inspection for access control. We describeits implementation for the CLR. Our tool inputs a set of librariesplus a description of the permissions granted to unknown,potentially hostile code. It constructs a permission-sensitivecall graph, which can be queried to identify potentialsecurity defects. It has been applied to large pre-existinglibraries.We also develop a new formal model of the essentials ofaccess control in the CLR (types, classes and inheritance,access modifiers, permissions, and stack inspection). In thismodel, we state and prove the correctness of the analysis.