New primitives to AOP weaving capabilities for security hardening concerns

Abstract

In this paper, we present two new primitives to Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) languages that are needed for systematic hardening of security concerns. These primitives are called exportParameter and importParameter and are used to pass parameters between two point cuts. They allow to analyze a program’s call graph in order to determine how to change function signatures for the passing of parameters associated with a given security hardening. We find this feature necessary in order to implement security hardening solutions that are infeasible or impractical using the current AOP proposals. Moreover, we show the viability and correctness of our proposed primitives by elaborating their algorithms and presenting experimental results.