CMCAP: Ephemeral Sandboxes for Adaptive Access Control

ABSTRACT

We present CMCAP (context-mapped capabilities), a decentralized mechanism for specifying and enforcing adaptive access control policies for resource-centric security. Policies in CMCAP express runtime constraints defined as containment domains with context-mapped capabilities, and ephemeral sandboxes for dynamically enforcing desired information flow properties while preserving functional correctness for the sandboxed programs. CMCAP is designed to remediate DAC's weakness and address the inflexibility that makes current MAC frameworks impractical to the common user. We use a Linux-based implementation of CMCAP to demonstrate how a program's dynamic profile is used for access control and intrusion prevention.

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Index Terms

• Security and privacy

  • Security services

    • Access control

  • Systems security

    • Information flow control