Enforcement of integrated security policy in trusted operating systems

Abstract

The main focus of Trusted Operating System (TOS) research these days is on the enhanced access control of reference monitors which, in turn, control the individual operations on a given access instance. However, many real-life runtime attacks involve behavioral semantics. It is desirable, therefore, to enforce an integrated security policy that includes both behavioral security and access control policies. We have proposed an extended reference monitor to support both access and behavior controls. This results in a sequence of operations which is also of concern in security enforcement. This paper presents the design of the extended reference monitor for integrated policy enforcement and describes its implementation in Linux operating systems. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.