Security verification of programs with stack inspection

Abstract

Java development kit 1.2 provides a runtime access control mechanism which inspects a control stack to examine whether the program has appropriate access permissions. Guaranteeing that each execution of a program with stack inspection satisfies required security properties is desirable. Jensen et al. introduced a verification problem of deciding for a given program P and a given security property written in a temporal logic formula, whether every reachable state of P satisfies . They showed that the problem is decidable for the class of programs which do not contain mutual recursion. In this paper, we show that the set of state sequences of a program is always an indexed language and consequently the verification problem is decidable. Our result is stronger than Jensen's in that a security property can be specified by a regular language, whose expressive power is stronger than temporal logic, and in that a program can contain mutual recursion.