Programmable access control¹

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Hale, John^{; *} | Papa, Mauricio | Shenoi, Sujeet

Affiliations: Department of Computer Science, University of Tulsa, Tulsa, OK 74104, USA

Correspondence: [*] Corresponding author. E-mail: john-hale@utulsa.edu.

Note: [1] Research supported by MPO Contract MDA 904-98-CA-900 and NSF Contract CCR-9984774.

Abstract: Software developers rely on sophisticated programming language protection models and APIs to manifest security policies for Internet applications. These tools do not provide suitable expressiveness for fine-grained, configurable policies. Nor do they ensure the consistency of a given policy implementation across objects in a heterogeneous environment. Programmable access control provides syntactic and semantic constructs in programming languages for systematically embedding security functionality within applications. Secure interoperability is of utmost importance in a distributed heterogeneous environment. This paper introduces a methodology for programmable security by language extension, as well as a prototype model and implementation of JPAC, a programmable access control extension to Java. A coordination language is also presented to support secure interoperability within the framework.

DOI: 10.3233/JCS-2003-11304

Journal: Journal of Computer Security, vol. 11, no. 3, pp. 331-351, 2003