History-based Access Control for Mobile Code
Guy Edjlali
Anurag Acharya
Vipin Chaudhary
ACM CCCS-98.
Abstract:
In this paper, we present a history-based access-control mechanism
that is suitable for mediating accesses from mobile code. The key
idea behind history-based access-control is to maintain a selective
history of the access requests made by individual programs and to use
this history to improve the differentiation between safe and
potentially dangerous requests. What a program is allowed to do
depends on its own behavior and identity in addition to currently used
discriminators like the location it was loaded from or the identity of
its author/provider. History-based access-control has the potential
to significantly expand the set of programs that can be executed
without compromising security or ease of use. We describe the design
and implementation of Deeds, a history-based access-control mechanism
for Java. Access-control policies for Deeds are written in Java, and
can be updated while the programs whose accesses are being mediated
are still executing.
Postscript