Chapter 8. The Java 2 Permission Model

The Java programming language has been one of the fastest -growing technologies in use on the Internet. The Java advantage is the promise that an application written once in the Java language can be run from any machine that has a Java virtual machine. From the early stages of Java development, it was realized that this feature poses the greatest challenge to Java security because code distribution is risky. For this reason, the Java 2 platform offers a built-in access-control architecture. In this chapter, we examine how access-control restrictions are enforced in the Java 2 platform. In particular, we study

• The foundations of the Java 2 security model, which include the permission API and the concepts of security Policy , CodeSource , and ProtectionDomain

• The Java 2 access-control architecture

• The concept of privileged code