16th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference
December 11-15, 2000
New Orleans, Louisiana
Extending Java for Package Based Access Control
Mauricio Papa, Oliver Bremer, Rodrigo Chandia, John Hale & Sujeet Shenoi
University of Tulsa
USA
This paper describes an extension of the Java language that provides
``programmable security.'' The approach augments the Java syntax
with constructs for specifying various access control policies for Java
packages, including DAC, MAC, RBAC and TBAC. A primitive
ticket based mechanism serves as the foundation for programmable
security.
The implementation incorporates a preprocessor for language translation
and
a security service library that implements the ticket management
infrastructure.
The preprocessor translates the extended Java source code to native Java
for eventual bytecode interpretation, simultaneously binding security
services
to the native code. The design is simple and flexible, and provides
developers
with an effective tool for "programming" security within Java packages.
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