Actually on Second thoughts, this security concern is unfounded
(paranoia perhaps, security is hard!), the ProtectionDomain of the
*-api.jar will be on the execution stack, the actual Permissions will be
those common to all ProtectionDomain's on the caller's stack, so
therefore having a ProtectionDomain with no permissions assigned to a
*-api.jar will cause the calling thread to have no permissions (as the
proxy sees it).
Therefore a proxy, if it is to utilise it's own permission grants, it
will need to use AccessController.doPrivileged()
That sounds better.
Anyway there will be no Permissions granted to any *-api.jar, ever as
I'm going to utilise the pre java 1.4 ProtectionDomain constructor, that
specifically prevents and excludes dynamic Policy grants. It won't even
consult the Policy.
I'm modifying DynamicPolicy to include grants by Certificate[], an
*-api.jar that is signed by a trusted certificate chain, still wont gain
any permissions. Can anyone see that as a problem?
The *-api.jar classes must not have dependencies on anything outside of
the Jini Platform, Java Platform or other *-api.jar classes. The reason
for this restriction, is if Someone want's to use OSGi or has a
dependency on another version of a library, the *-api.jar importing an
incompatible version, would obscure it's visibility and cause a runtime
error.
These restrictions shouldn't cause a problem for people as they're easy
to design around. It makes security simpler for developers too. - You
don't have to worry about the security of the code in *-api.jar
Cheers,
Peter.
Peter Firmstone wrote:
Dennis Reedy wrote:
Chris, Dennis & Greg, your all spot on with the Service-spec.jar,
I'd like to add something to the jar Manifest of these Service
Interfaces, to ensure River loads it into the top level
ClassLoader. Any suggestions?
Why not just support the convention instead of adding configuration?
Ok.
There is one Security Concern that I will have to address with this
Approach:
ClassLoader Structure:
System ClassLoader
|
Extension ClassLoader (incl jsk-policy.jar)
|
Jini Platform ClassLoader (incl jsk-platform.jar,
*-api.jar)
|
_______________|________________
| |
Application ClassLoader Proxy ClassLoader's
The *-api.jar files will be placed into Jini Platform ClassLoader, so
the only files visible will be the jini platform classes, java
platform classes and any other *-api.jar classes.
The *-api.jar classes will have their own ProtectionDomain's without
any Permissions.
However this isn't enough to protect us from code that might be
included in the *-api.jar's that use the calling Threads Permissions
to perform security violating actions.
Due to these security concerns, we need to place some restrictions on
the API classes:
1. They must not be allowed to depend on anything other than Jini,
Java Platform and other Service-api.jar's
2. They must not be allowed to depend on any Platform classes that
could cause a Security Violation.
The Service API code really needs to be verified before loading, to
ensure that it does not utilise any platform classes that perform
security sensitive operations.
The ClassDep tool can run a Dependency Analysis on any *-api.jar to
ensure that no security sensitive classes are accessed, prior to loading.
There is some residual risk that as the Java platform evolves, new
classes that perform Security Sensitive actions will be added, which
means the list of restricted classes will need to grow over time.
Could the list itself be contained in a Maven Repository, we could
sign, such a list.
Thoughts?
Peter.
