Control flow based pointcuts for security hardening concerns

Abstract

In this paper, we present two new control flow based point-cuts to Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) languages that are needed for systematic hardening of security concerns. They allow to identify particular join points in a program’s control flow graph (CFG). The first proposed primitive is the GAFlow, the closest guaranteed ancestor, which returns the closest ancestor join point to the pointcuts of interest that is on all their runtime paths. The second proposed primitive is the GDFlow, the closest guaranteed descendant, which returns the closest child join point that can be reached by all paths starting from the pointcuts of interest. We find these pointcuts to be necessary because they are needed to perform many security hardening practices and, to the best of our knowledge, none of the existing pointcuts can provide their functionalities. Moreover, we show the viability and correctness of our proposed pointcuts by elaborating and implementing their algorithms and presenting the results of a testing case study.

This research is the result of a fruitful collaboration between CSL (Computer Security Laboratory) of Concordia University, DRDC (Defence Research and Development Canada) Valcartier and Bell Canada under the NSERC DND Research Partnership Program.