Combining Static Analysis and Runtime Checking in Security Aspects for Distributed Tuple Spaces

Enforcing security policies to distributed systems is difficult, in particular, to a system containing untrusted components. We designed AspectKE*, an aspect-oriented programming language based on distributed tuple spaces to tackle this issue. One of the key features in AspectKE* is the program analysis predicates and functions that provide information on future behavior of a program.

With a dual value evaluation mechanism that handles results of static analysis and runtime values at the same time, those functions and predicates enable the users to specify security policies in a uniform manner. Our two-staged implementation strategy gathers fundamental static analysis information at load-time, so as to avoid performing all analysis at runtime.

We built a compiler for AspectKE*, and successfully implemented security aspects for a distributed chat system and an electronic healthcare record workflow system.