Policy-driven reflective enforcement of security policies

Abstract

Practical experience has shown that separating security enforcement code from functional code using separation of concerns techniques such as behavioural reflection leads to improvements in code undestandability and maintainability. However, using these techniques at requires providing a consistent and declarative way to specify policies. We have developed a prototype tool that allows the use of Ponder policies that are enforced by the Kava metaobject protocol. This prototype translates high-level policies into configuration files used to enforce the policies upon Java applications.