A fundamental problem in software-based security is whether local security checks inserted into the code are sufficient to implement a global security property. We introduce a formalism based on a two-level lineartime temporal logic for specifying global security properties pertaining to the control-flow of the program, and illustrate its expressive power with a number of existing properties. We define a minimalistic, security-dedicated program model that only contains procedure call and run-time security checks and propose an automatic method for verifying that an implementation using local security checks satisfies a global security property. For a given formula in the temporal logic we prove that there exists a bound on the size of the states that have to be considered in order to assure the validity of the formula: this reduces the problem to finite-state model checking. Finally, we instantiate the framework to the security architecture proposed for Java (JDK 1.2).

A fundamental problem in software-based security is whether local security checks inserted into the code are sufficient to implement a global security property. This article introduces a formalism based on a linear-time temporal logic for specifying global security properties pertaining to the control flow of the program, and illustrates its expressive power with a number of existing properties. We define a minimalistic, security-dedicated program model that only contains procedure call and run-time security checks and propose an automatic method for verifying that an implementation using local security checks satisfies a global security property. We then show how to instantiate the framework to the security architecture of Java 2 based on stack inspection and privileged method calls.