Lightweight Inlined Reference Monitors for Securing Extensible and Open Systems
Phu H. Phung · 2008
Thesis for the degree of Licentiate of Engineering, a Swedish degree between M.Sc. and Ph.D. This thesis studies an alternative implementation of a security reference monitor in the contexts of extensible and open systems. A security reference monitor is a classic approach to imposing a security policy on an otherwise untrusted system by using a trusted component which intercepts security-relevant resource requests and applies a security policy to decide whether to grant such requests. Recently, an application-level approach to implementing reference mon-itors has emerged. This is the so-called inlined reference monitor (IRM) approach where the software is rewritten to embed (inline) the policy within it. This thesis presents an alternative implementation of the IRM approach by using aspect-oriented programming. We call this the lightweight inlined reference monitor approach, since it does not require modification of the