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Security-by-Contract: Toward a Semantics for Digital Signatures on Mobile Code

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Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNSC,volume 4582)

Abstract

In this paper we propose the notion of security-by-contract, a mobile contract that an application carries with itself. The key idea of the framework is that a digital signature should not just certify the origin of the code but rather bind together the code with a contract. We provide a description of the overall life-cycle of mobile code in the setting of security-by-contract, describe a tentative structure for a contractual language and propose a number of algorithms for one of the key steps in the process, the contract-policy matching issue. We argue that security-by-contract would provide a semantics for digital signatures on mobile code thus being a step in the transition from trusted code to trustworthy code.

Keywords

  • Digital Signature
  • Security Policy
  • Simulation Relation
  • Mobile Code
  • Parity Game

These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Research partly supported by the project EU-IST-STREP-S3MS.

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Javier Lopez Pierangela Samarati Josep L. Ferrer

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Dragoni, N., Massacci, F., Naliuka, K., Siahaan, I. (2007). Security-by-Contract: Toward a Semantics for Digital Signatures on Mobile Code. In: Lopez, J., Samarati, P., Ferrer, J.L. (eds) Public Key Infrastructure. EuroPKI 2007. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4582. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-73408-6_21

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-73408-6_21

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-73407-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-73408-6

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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