Combining Security with Meta Programming in Java

This article investigates the security issues raised by the use of meta-programming systems with Java. For each possible type of MOP (compile-time, load-time, etc.), we study what are the permissions required for both the base and the meta-level protection domains, taking into account the ow of control between the di erent parts of the application. We show that the choice of a particular MOP architecture has a strong impact on the security issues. Another important outcome of this article is the following: in a component-based architecture with code from various origins and trusts, we provide a set of rules for combining the permissions associated with each protection domain (integration, base-level, meta-level, etc.).