Toward More Composable Software-Security Policies: Tools and Techniques

Complex software-security policies are dicult to specify, understand, and update. The same is true for complex software in general, but while many tools and techniques exist for decomposing complex general software into simpler reusable modules (packages, classes, functions, aspects, etc.), few tools exist for decomposing complex security policies into simpler reusable modules. The tools that do exist for modularizing policies either encapsulate entire policies as atomic modules that cannot be decomposed or allow ne-grained policy modularization but require expertise to use correctly. This dissertation presents a policy-composition tool called PoliSeer [27, 26] and the PoCo policy-composition software-security language. PoliSeer is a GUI-based tool designed to enable users who are not expert policy engineers to exibly specify, visualize, modify, and enforce complex runtime policies on untrusted software. PoliSeer users rely on expert policy engineers to specify universally composable policy modules; PoliSeer users then build complex policies by composing those expert-written modules. This dissertation describes the design and implementation of PoliSeer and a case study in which we have used PoliSeer to specify and enforce a policy on PoliSeer itself. PoCo is a language for specifying composable software-security policies. PoCo users specify software-security policies in terms of abstract input-output event sequences. The policy outputs are expressive, capable of describing all desired, irrelevant, and prohibited events at once. These descriptive outputs compose well: operations for combining them satisfy a large number of algebraic properties, which allows policy hierarchies to be designed more simply and naturally. We demonstrate PoCo\u27s capability via a case study in which a sophisticated policy is implemented in PoCo