A Language and System for Composing Security Policies

Report ID: TR-699-04
Author: Walker, David / Bauer, Lujo / Ligatti, Jay
Date: 2004-04-00
Pages: 23
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Abstract:

We introduce a new language and system that allows security architects to develop well-structured and easy-to-maintain security policies for Java applications. In our system, policies are first-class objects. Consequently, programmers can define parameterized meta-policies that act as policy combinators and policy modifiers, so that complex security policies can be implemented by composing simple base policies. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our design by building up a library of powerful policy combinators and showing how they can be used. We also describe some issues we encountered while implementing our system and provide performance results.acro