Secure compilation of object-oriented components to protected module architectures

Abstract

A fully abstract compilation scheme prevents the security features of the high-level language from being bypassed by an attacker operating at a particular lower level. This paper presents a fully abstract compilation scheme from a realistic object-oriented language with dynamic memory allocation, cross-package inheritance, exceptions and inner classes to untyped machine code. Full abstraction of the compilation scheme relies on enhancing the low-level machine model with a fine-grained, program counter-based memory access control mechanism. This paper contains the outline of a formal proof of full abstraction of the compilation scheme. Measurements of the overhead introduced by the compilation scheme indicate that it is negligible. © Springer International Publishing 2013.