Lightweight Verification of Control Flow Policies on Java Bytecode

This paper presents the enforcement of control flow policies for Java bytecode devoted to open and constrained devices. On-device enforcement of security policies mostly relies on run-time monitoring or inline checking code, which is not appropriate for strongly constrained devices such as mobile phones and smart-cards. We present a proof-carrying code approach with on-device lightweight verification of control flow policies statically at loading- time. Our approach is suitable for evolving, open and constrained Java-based systems as it is compositional, to avoid re-verification of already verified bytecode upon loading of new bytecode, and it is regressive, to cleanly support bytecode unloading.