Practical, dynamic informationflow for virtual machines

Abstract. For decades, secure operating systems have incorporated mandatory access control (MAC) techniques. Surprisingly, mobile-code platforms such as the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and the.NET Common Language Runtime (CLR) have largely ignored these advances and have implemented a far weaker security that does not reliably track ownership and access permissions for indi-vidual data items. We have implemented a system that adds MAC to an exist-ing JVM at the granularity of objects. Our system maintains a strict separation between mechanism and policy, thereby allowing a wide range of policies to be enforced. Moreover, our implementation is independent of any specific JVM, and will work with any JVM that supports the JVM Tools Interface.