Inlined Reference Monitors for Java Bytecode

Current state-of-the-art technology for specifying and enforcing security policies for software is generally too inflexible, coarse-grained, and difficult to use. In systems that make use of mobile code, such as Java applets, the situation is yet more difficult. A more flexible and powerful approach is needed that will allow a wider range of security policies to be set by various policy-setting authorities for different applications. At the same time, there must be check-box simplicity. We propose to commercialize mechanisms for specifying and enforcing security policies for mobile code that work by inserting fragments of code into programs in order to monitor their state and prevent them from violating security policies. The proposed system will allow arbitrary policies to be specified independently by different policy-setting authorities. We will apply this approach, named Inlined Reference Monitors (IRMs), to Java bytecode using a technique called aspect-oriented programming. We will leverage existing static-analysis technologies in the implementation of a security policy toolkit.