A Simple Semantics and Static Analysis for Java Security

Security in Java depends on an access control mechanism specified operationally in terms of run-time stack inspection. We give a denotational semantics in “eager” form, and show that it is equivalent to the “lazy” semantics using stack inspection. We give a static analysis of safety, i.e., the absence of security errors, that is significantly simpler than previous proposals. We identify several program transformations that can be used to remove run-time checks. We give complete, detailed proofs for safety of the analysis and for the transformations, exploiting compositionality of the “eager” semantics. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grants EIA-9806835 and INT-9813854. A Simple Semantics and Static Analysis for Java Security Anindya Banerjee a,1 aStevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, NJ 07030 USA David A. Naumann b,2 bStevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, NJ 07030 USA