Security Agility for Dynamic Execution Environments
Tim Fraser, Mike Petkac, Lee Badger · 2002
The Security Agility for Dynamic Execution Environments project developed practical solutions to problems faced by traditional applications in environments governed by dynamically reconfigurable security policies, In such environments, applications that are unaware of the security policy's dynamic nature may crash or misbehave when confronted with security policy changes that revoke their resources. They may fail to recover when subsequent security policy changes restore their access to resources. They may fail to abort activities that are rendered illegal by security changes made while the activities are already in progress. The project's primary result was the development of a software toolkit for retrofitting existing dynamically linked applications with new "agile" mechanisms to avoid or compensate for these failures. With the help of the software toolkit, existing UNIX applications can be retrofitted with new functionality that allows them to operate effectively in new environments governed by dynamically reconfigurable security policies, even in cases where the application's source code is not available.