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Enforcing Programming Guidelines with Region Types and Effects

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Programming Languages and Systems (APLAS 2017)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 10695))

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Abstract

We present in this paper a new type and effect system for Java which can be used to ensure adherence to guidelines for secure web programming. The system is based on the region and effect system by Beringer, Grabowski, and Hofmann. It improves upon it by being parametrized over an arbitrary guideline supplied in the form of a finite monoid or automaton and a type annotation or mockup code for external methods. Furthermore, we add a powerful type inference based on precise interprocedural analysis and provide an implementation in the Soot framework which has been tested on a number of benchmarks including large parts of the Stanford SecuriBench.

This research is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) under research grant 250888164 (GuideForce).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Alternatively, the monoid can be generated automatically from the policy automaton (or its complement).

  2. 2.

    In Java, the \(\mathtt {NullType}\) is the type of the expression \(\mathtt {null}\), see https://docs.oracle.com/javase/specs/jls/se7/html/jls-4.html#jls-4.1.

  3. 3.

    Note that such a class always exists, as \(C\preceq \mathtt {Object}\), for any \(C\in {\textit{Cls}}\).

  4. 4.

    The implementation is available for download from one of the authors’ homepage.

  5. 5.

    https://suif.stanford.edu/~livshits/work/securibench-micro/.

  6. 6.

    https://suif.stanford.edu/~livshits/work/securibench/.

  7. 7.

    As usual, the formal description of our analysis is in terms of an idealized language, FJEUCS. The implementation takes genuine Java programs. However, it does not support certain features such as concurrency and reflection, which we discuss below.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich, Bavaria, Germany

    Serdar Erbatur & Martin Hofmann

  2. Institut Für Informatik, Technische Universität München, Munich, Germany

    Eugen Zălinescu

Authors
  1. Serdar Erbatur
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  2. Martin Hofmann
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  3. Eugen Zălinescu
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Eugen Zălinescu .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado, USA

    Bor-Yuh Evan Chang

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Erbatur, S., Hofmann, M., Zălinescu, E. (2017). Enforcing Programming Guidelines with Region Types and Effects. In: Chang, BY. (eds) Programming Languages and Systems. APLAS 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10695. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71237-6_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71237-6_5

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