Adding capability-based protection to the Rotor (MS Rotor RFPv1)
On the cost of securing applications - Performance of .NET CAS protection and capabilities (MS Rotor RFPv2)

Adding capability-based protection to the Rotor
or, Why not other protection mechanism?

One of the Pilot Projects using the Shared Source implementation of CLI and C# (“Rotor”) selected by Microsoft Research

  • MS Research Rotor Projects Home
  • Goal

    To research on (pure) capabilities as a protection mechanism for object systems based on virtual machines, using the Rotor VM as a vehicle. Capabilities have many merits. The focus is on the access control system. I.e. to control whether a client object instance is allowed to call a method in a given server object instance.

    A capability is an access control mechanism that attaches a set of access permissions (allowed/not allowed) to a reference pointing to a given object. The mechanism stops a method invocation if the object reference does not hold in the permission set an “allow” for the method called.

    Poster and paper

    You can download the Poster (560K PDF) shown at the 2nd Annual Rotor Workshop held on Redmond, Washington in September of 2003
    The paper Alternative protection systems for OO environments: Capability-based protection and the SSCLI-Rotor. .NET Technologies 2004, Pilsen, Czech Republic. June 2004.

    Download RotorCapa

  • Download RotorCapa1.0 (ZIP)
  • You just have to substitute these files into the Rotor 1.0 source tree.

    On the cost of securing applications
    Performance of .NET CAS protection and capabilities

    One of the projects selected by Microsoft Research for the second Shared Source implementation of CLI and C# (“Rotor”) RFP

  • MS Research Rotor Projects Home
  • Goal

    To measure the cost of different protection mechanisms (Code Access Security), in the particular case of .NET CAS and capabilities, using Rotor and RotorCapa as a testbed.

    Presentation

    For the moment, you can download the slides from the presentation (PDF) shown at the Rotor Capstone Workshop held on Redmond, Washington, in September of 2005.

    Contact

  • Darío Álvarez Gutiérrez
  • Marián Díaz Fondón
  • Object-Oriented Technologies Research Group
    Departamento de Informática (Department of Informatics)