Enforcing user-space privilege separation with declarative architectures

Applying privilege separation in software development is an effective strategy for limiting the damage of an attack on a software system. In this approach, a software system is separated into a set of communicating protection domains of least privilege. In a privilege-separated system, even if one protection domain is hijacked by an attacker, the rest of the system may still function. uPro is a tool that provides efficient and flexible enforcement of privilege separation. It adopts software-based fault isolation to implement protection domains in the user-space so that inter-domain communication is efficient. It provides a declarative language to describe an application's security architecture, facilitating developers to identify different architecture alternatives. The evaluation shows that real applications can be ported to uPro with enhanced security, acceptable performance, and declarative architectures.