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Policy ignorant caller-side inline reference monitoring

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Abstract

Runtime security policy enforcement systems are crucial to limit the risks associated with running untrustworthy (malicious or buggy) code. The inlined reference monitor approach to policy enforcement, pioneered by Erlingsson and Schneider, implements runtime enforcement through program rewriting: security checks are inserted inside untrusted programs. Ensuring complete mediation—the guarantee that every security-relevant event is actually intercepted by the monitor—is non-trivial when the program rewriter operates on an object-oriented intermediate language with state-of-the-art features such as virtual methods and delegates. This paper proposes a caller-side rewriting algorithm for MSIL—the bytecode of the .NET virtual machine—where security checks are inserted around calls to security-relevant methods. We prove that this algorithm achieves sound and complete mediation and transparency for a simplified model of MSIL and report on our experiences with the implementation of the algorithm for full MSIL.

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Notes

  1. A method invocation is when the execution enters a new method. Method calls are first dispatched to find the actual target method before they are invoked.

  2. In the remainder of this section, we assume that the assemblies do not contain the callvirt and ldftn instructions. This restriction will be relaxed in the next sections.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. iMinds-DistriNet, KU Leuven Celestijnenlaan, 200A 3001+++, Leuven, Belgium

    Dries Vanoverberghe & Frank Piessens

Authors
  1. Dries Vanoverberghe
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  2. Frank Piessens
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Dries Vanoverberghe.

Additional information

D. Vanoverberghe is a postdoctoral researcher of the Fund for Scientific Research, Flanders (FWO).

Appendix

Appendix

1.1 Operational semantics

See Figs. 8, 9, 10 and 11.

Fig. 8
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Evaluation rules for normal execution (part 1)

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Fig. 9
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Evaluation rules for normal execution (part 2)

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Fig. 10
figure 10

Evaluation rules for exception handling

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Fig. 11
figure 11

Evaluation rule for virtual calls

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Vanoverberghe, D., Piessens, F. Policy ignorant caller-side inline reference monitoring. Int J Softw Tools Technol Transfer 17, 291–303 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10009-014-0348-8

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