Reflections on MOPs, Components, and Java Security

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 the permissions required for both the base and the meta-level protection domains, taking into account the flow of control between the different parts of the application. We show that the choice of a particular MOP architecture has a strong impact on security issues. Assuming a component-based architecture with code from various origins having different levels of trust, we establish a set of rules for combining the permissions associated with each protection domain (integration, base-level, meta-level, etc.).