Security-policy monitoring and enforcement with JavaMOP

Abstract

Software security attacks represent an ever growing problem. One way to make software more secure is to use Inlined Reference Monitors (IRMs), which allow security specifications to be inlined inside a target program to ensure its compliance with the desired security specifications. The IRM approach has been developed primarily by the security community. Runtime Verification (RV), on the other hand, is a software engineering approach, which is intended to formally encode system specifications within a target program such that those specifications can be later enforced during the execution of the program. Until now, the IRM and RV approaches have lived separate lives; in particular RV techniques have not been applied to the security domain, being used instead to aid program correctness and testing. This paper discusses the usage of a formalism-generic RV system, JavaMOP, as a means to specify IRMs, leveraging the careful engineering of the JavaMOP system for ensuring secure operation of software in an efficient manner.