Security-by-contract on the .NET platform

The concept of security-by-contract (SxC) and its implementation on the .NET platform is described and this new model allows users to guarantee that an untrusted application remains within the boundaries of acceptable behavior, as defined by the user herself.

Abstract

Over the last few years, the success of GPS-enabled PDAs has finally instigated a breakthrough of mobile devices. Many people now already have a device that can connect to the internet and run untrusted code, typically a cell-phone or PDA. Having such a large interconnected and powerful computing base presents some new security issues. In order to counter new threats, the traditional security architectures need to be overhauled to support a new and more flexible way of securely executing mobile code. This article describes the concept of security-by-contract (SxC) and its implementation on the .NET platform. This new model allows users to guarantee that an untrusted application remains within the boundaries of acceptable behavior, as defined by the user herself. A number of different techniques will be presented that can be employed to enforce this behavior. In order to support the SxC paradigm, some new steps can be introduced in the application development process. In addition to building an application, developers can create an application contract and securely bind this contract to the application. The application deployment process supports legacy applications developed without such contracts, but it can support more advanced enforcement technologies for those applications that are SxC aware.