Lightweight Enforcement of Fine-Grained Security Policies for Untrusted Software
Doctoral thesis, 2011

This thesis presents an innovative approach to implementing a security enforcement mechanism in the contexts of untrusted software systems, where a piece of code in a base system may come from an untrusted third party. The key point of the approach is that it is lightweight in the sense that it does not need an additional policy language or extra tool. Instead, the approach uses the aspect-oriented programming paradigm – a programmatic means to modify the behaviour of an application based on aspects – to specify security policies and embed the policies into untrusted software. As a result, security policies can be fine-grained and application-specific, and can be inlined into the untrusted software without modifying the base system, in order to detect and prevent unintended behaviour of the software at runtime. The approach has been elaborated in two particular untrusted software contexts in this thesis. Firstly, we have developed the approach in the context of a vehicle software architecture, where a third-party application can be installed and executed in a vehicle system. We have shown that various classes of fine-grained security policies can be specified and enforced in such a system by the approach. The security assurance provided by the enforcement mechanism is promising for deployment in an existing vehicle software system. Furthermore, we have identified a number of potential threats in the vehicle software architecture and developed countermeasures in terms of security policies. We have demonstrated the deployment of countermeasures to prevent possible attacks. Secondly, we have studied web application security. We propose a novel enforcement method called lightweight self-protecting JavaScript by applying the lightweight approach in the context of web security. The method prevents or modifies inappropriate behaviour of JavaScript execution in web pages by intercepting security relevant API calls. Unlike other approaches to enforcing policies for JavaScript, the enforcement and policy code are provided as a library and therefore do not require a modified browser. Furthermore, the approach does not employ runtime parsing or transformation of code, and thus has low runtime overhead. We also present an application of the method in the context of untrusted JavaScript such as mashups by proposing a two-tier sandbox architecture in which untrusted JavaScript code can be loaded and executed dynamically. The execution of untrusted code is monitored by modular and fine-grained security policies defined via an adaptation of self-protecting JavaScript to ensure security for the hosting page.

security policy enforcement

JavaScript security

web-application security

vehicle software security

untrusted software

Lecture room EC, ED&IT-building, Rännvägen 6B, Chalmers University of Technology
Opponent: Associate Professor V.N. Venkatakrishnan

Author

Phu Phung

Chalmers, Computer Science and Engineering (Chalmers)

A Model for Safe and Secure Execution of Downloaded Vehicle Applications

Proceedings of Road Transport Information and Control - RTIC 2010, IET,; (2010)

Paper in proceeding

Safe Wrappers and Sane Policies for Self Protecting JavaScript

Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics),; Vol. 7127(2012)p. 239-255

Paper in proceeding

Lightweight Self-Protecting JavaScript

Proceedings of ACM Symposium on Information, Computer and Communications Security (ASIACCS 2009),; (2009)p. 47-60

Paper in proceeding

Security Policy Enforcement for the OSGi Framework Using Aspect-Oriented Programming

Proceedings of the 32nd Annual International Computer Software and Applications Conference (COMPSAC 2008), 28 July - 01 August 2008, Turku, Finland. IEEE Computer Society 2008,; (2008)p. 1076-1082

Paper in proceeding

Areas of Advance

Information and Communication Technology

Subject Categories

Software Engineering

Computer Science

ISBN

978-91-7385-578-5

Doktorsavhandlingar vid Chalmers tekniska högskola. Ny serie: 3259

Technical report D - Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Chalmers University of Technology and Göteborg University: 79

Lecture room EC, ED&IT-building, Rännvägen 6B, Chalmers University of Technology

Opponent: Associate Professor V.N. Venkatakrishnan

More information

Created

10/6/2017