Computer Engineering Commons^™

Access Control Contracts For Java Program Modules, Carlos E. Rubio-Medrano, Yoonsik Cheon

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Application-level security has become an issue in recent years; for example, errors, discrepancies and omissions in the specification of access control constraints of security-sensitive software components are recognized as an important source for security vulnerabilities. We propose to formally specify access control assumptions or constraints of a program module and enforce them at run-time. We call such specifications access control contracts. To realize access control contracts, we extended the JML language, a formal interface specification language for Java, and developed a prototype support tool that translates access control contracts to runtime checks. The access control contract reduces the vulnerability that …