🤖 AI Summary
Traditional access control mechanisms rely solely on static bindings between applications and files, neglecting application intent and operational context, thereby offering limited protection against malicious actions and user errors. This work proposes a mandatory access control approach grounded in application execution history and semantic intent, introducing program runtime state and contextual semantics into access decisions for the first time and thus transcending the limitations of classical subject-object models. A state-aware policy enforcement engine is implemented as a Linux kernel module, integrated with execution path tracking to construct a fine-grained, context-sensitive access control framework. The effectiveness of this approach is validated through a prototype implementation in TOMOYO Linux. Experimental results demonstrate a significant reduction in security risks arising from both malicious accesses and inadvertent user operations.
📝 Abstract
Existing access control methods grant access requests based on the combinations of applications as subject and files as objects. Therefore intents of applications and the possible effects caused by granting the access requests have not been taken into consideration. In this paper, we propose a new access control method based on application history and intents. With our access control method, system administrators can reduce the risks caused by malicious access attempts and wrong operations. In this paper, the concept and implementation design will be explained as well as the brief evaluation report of TOMOYO Linux, our implementation of the new access control method to Linux.