Reasoning about Security in Mobile Ambients

The paper gives an assessment of security for Mobile Ambients, with specific focus on mandatory access control (MAC) policies in multilevel security systems. The first part of the paper reports on different formalization attempts for MAC policies in the Ambient Calculus, and provides an in-depth analysis of the problems one encounters. As it turns out, MAC security does not appear to have fully convincing interpretations in the calculus. The second part proposes a solution to this impasse, based on a variant of Mobile Ambients. A type system for resource access control is defined, and the new calculus is discussed and illustrated with several examples of resource management policies. In CONCUR 2001, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2154:102{120, c Springer, 2001.