Secure Composition of Insecure Components

Software systems are becoming heterogeneous: instead of a small number of large programs from well-established sources, a user’s desktop may now consist of many smaller components that interact in intricate ways. Some components will be downloaded from the network from sources that are only partially trusted. A user would like to know that a number of security properties hold, e.g. that personal data is not leaked to the net, but it is typically infeasible to verify that such components are well-behaved. Instead, they must be executed in a secure environment, orwrapper, that provides fine-grain control of the allowable interactions between them, and between components and other system resources. In this paper we study such wrappers, focusing on how they can be expressed in a way that enables their security properties to be stated and proved rigorously. We introduce a model programming language, the boxcalculus, that supports composition of software components and the enforcement of security policies. Several example wrappers are expressed using the calculus; we explore the delicate security properties they guarantee.