Security-Policy Monitoring and Enforcement with JavaMOP

Soha Hussein and Patrick Meredith and Grigore Rosu
PLAS'12 ACM, pp 3:1-3:11, June 2012
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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.