Abstract

The Java JDK 1.2 Security Architecture includes a dynamic mechanism for enforcing access control checks, so-called stack inspection. This paper studies type systems which can statically guarantee the success of these checks. We develop these systems using a new, systematic methodology: we show that the security-passing style translation, proposed by Wallach and Felten as a dynamic implementation technique, also gives rise to static security-aware type systems, by composition with conventional type systems. To dene the latter, we use the general HM(X) framework, and easily construct several constraint- and unification-based type systems. They oer signicant improvements on a previous type system for JDK access control, both in terms of expressiveness and in terms of readability of inferred type specifications.

Citations