Graduation Year

2020

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree

Ph.D.

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)

Degree Granting Department

Computer Science and Engineering

Major Professor

Jay Ligatti, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Yao Liu, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Lawrence Hall, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Sanjukta Bhanja, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Theodore Molla, Ph.D.

Keywords

Code granularity, Liveness, Runtime enforcement, Safety, Security mechanisms

Abstract

Security policies stipulate restrictions on the behaviors of systems to prevent themfrom behaving in harmful ways. One way to ensure that systems satisfy the constraints of a security policy is through the use of security enforcement mechanisms. To understand the fundamental limitations of such mechanisms, formal methods are employed to prove properties and reason about their behaviors. The particular formalism employed, however, typically depends on the time at which a mechanism operates.

Mechanisms operating before a program's execution are static mechanisms, and mechanisms operating during a program's execution are dynamic mechanisms. Static mechanisms are fundamentally limited in the types of policies that they can enforce, due to the lack of runtime information. However, the class of policies enforceable by particular types of dynamic mechanisms typically depends on the capabilities of the mechanism.

An open, foundational question in computer security is whether additional sorts of security mechanisms exist. This dissertation takes a step towards answering this question by presenting a unifying theory of security mechanisms that casts existing mechanisms into a single framework based on the granularity of program code that they monitor. Classifying mechanisms in this way provides a unified view of security mechanisms and shows that all security mechanisms can be encoded as dynamic mechanisms that operate at one or more levels of program code granularity. This unified view has allowed us to identify new types of security mechanisms capable of enforcing security policies at various levels of code granularity. This dissertation also demonstrates the practicality of the theory through a prototype implementation that enables security policies to be enforced on Java bytecode applications at various levels of code granularity. The precision and effectiveness of the implementation hinges on an extensible Java library that we have developed, called JaBRO, that enables runtime code analysis on optimized Java bytecode at runtime. It is shown that JaBRO allows some security policies to be enforced more precisely at runtime than statically operating mechanisms.

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