JVM-portable sandboxing of Java's native libraries

Abstract

Although Java provides strong support for safety and security, native libraries used in a Java application can open security holes. Previous work, Robusta, puts native libraries in a sandbox to protect the integrity and security of Java. However, Robusta's implementation modifies the internals of OpenJDK, a particular implementation of a Java Virtual Machine (JVM). As such, it is not portable to other JVM implementations. This paper shows how to make the idea of sandboxing native libraries JVM-portable. We present a two-layer approach for sandboxing without modifying the internals of a JVM. We also discuss our experience of sandboxing Java's core native libraries. Experiments show that our approach of JVM-portable sandboxing incurs modest performance overhead on SPECjvm 2008 benchmark programs. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.