A security framework for reflective Java applications

Abstract

The advent of component‐based reflective applications raises the issue of protecting baselevel components from the actions performed by metalevel components. However, by their very nature, reflective applications are far more difficult to secure than non‐reflective applications, which certainly explains why the problem has received very little attention so far. In this paper we present a security framework for enforcing access control between metalevel components and the baselevel components they reflect on. Rather than designing a new security architecture from scratch, we extend the standard security architecture of Java to provide security for a fully‐functional proxy‐based MOP for Java. We implement a number of well‐known meta‐level behaviors and study their security requirements, the results of which support our design choices. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

An Access Control Framework for Reflective Middleware

“…First, it will put an unendurable impact on the performance of business transactions because Java security manager checks any access appearing in Java Virtual Machine, which decreases the performance of the whole Java program by 13%∼14% [15] . Second, the specification of security policies is much more complex than that specified in the J2EE deployment descriptor.…”

“…The composer is the unique point via which the meta entities can access the base entities. Caromel et al defined a set of Java permissions specific to the base entities and use Java security manager to control the access between the meta entities and the base entities [15] , which suffers the 13%∼14% performance overhead. As mentioned in the section about the access control mechanism between the meta entities, the standard JMX access control suffers the same performance overhead as that of Caromel et al and cannot be seamlessly integrated with the standard J2EE access control.…”