CMU-ISR-09-113
Institute for Software Research
School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University



CMU-ISR-09-113

Enforcing Conformance between
Security Architecture and Implementation

Marwan Abi-Antoun, Jeffrey M. Barnes

April 2009

CMU-ISR-09-113.ps.zip
CMU-ISR-09-113.pdf


Keywords: Runtime architecture, security architecture, threat modeling, conformance analysis, enforcement


Analysis at the level of a runtime architecture matches the way experts reason about security or privacy better than a purely code-based strategy. However, the architecture must still be correctly realized in the implementation.

We previously developed Scholia to analyze, at compile time, communication integrity between arbitrary object-oriented code, and a rich, hierarchical intended runtime architecture, using typecheckable annotations. This paper applies Scholia to security runtime architectures. Having established traceability between the target architecture and the code, we extend Scholia to enforce structural architectural constraints. At the code level, annotations enforce local, modular constraints. At the architectural level, predicates enforce global constraints. We validate the end-to-end approach in practice using a real 3,000-line Java implementation, and enforce its conformance to a security architecture designed by an expert.

35 pages


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