Trust-Based Protection of Software Component Users and Designers

Abstract. Software component technology supports the cost-effective design of applications suited to the particular needs of the application owners. This design method, however, causes two new security risks. At first, a malicious component may attack the application incorporating it. At second, an application owner may incriminate a component designer falsely for any damage in his application which in reality was caused by somebody else. The first risk is addressed by security wrappers control-ling the behavior at the component interface at runtime and enforcing certain security policies in order to protect the other components of the application against attacks from the monitored component. Moreover, we use trust management to reduce the significant performance overhead of the security wrappers. Here, the kind and intensity of monitoring a com-ponent is adjusted according to the experience of other users with this component. Therefore a so-called trust information service collects posi-tive and negative experience reports of the component from various users