Cross-tier, label-based security enforcement for web applications

This paper presents SELinks, a programming language focused on building secure multi-tier web applications. SELinks provides a uniform programming model, in the style of LINQ and Ruby on Rails, with language syntax for accessing objects residing either on the database or at the server. Object-level security policies are expressed as labels, which are fully-customizable, first-class objects and may themselves be subject to security policies. Access to labeled data is mediated via trusted, user-provided policy enforcement functions. SELinks has two novel features that ensure security policies are enforced correctly and efficiently. First, SELinks implements a previously proposed type system called Fable that allows a protected object's type to refer to its protecting label. The type system can check that labeled data is never accessed directly by the program without first passing through the appropriate policy enforcement function. Second, SELinks compiles policy enforcement code t...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: SIGMOD
• Authors: Brian J. Corcoran, Nikhil Swamy, Michael W. Hicks
• Keywords: Database, Object-level Security Policies, Policy Enforcement, Security Policies, SIGMOD 2009