Security Patterns in Practice: Designing Secure Architectures Using Software Patterns

CHAPTER 7

Patterns for Secure Process Management

Music is given to us with the sole purpose of establishing an order in things, including, and particularly, the coordination between man and time.

Igor Stravinsky

7.1 Introduction

Operating systems are fundamental to the provision of security to computing systems. The operating system supports the execution of applications, and any security constraints defined by applications must be enforced by the operating system. The operating system must also protect itself, because compromise would give access to all the user accounts and all the data in their files. A weak operating system would allow hackers access not only to data in the operating system files, but data in database systems that use the services of the operating system. The operating system enables this protection by protecting processes from each other and protecting the permanent data stored in its files [Sil05]. For this purpose, the operating system controls access to resources such as memory address spaces and I/O devices. Most operating systems use an access matrix or the ROLEBASED ACCESS CONTROL pattern (page 78) as a security model. For example, an access matrix defines which processes (subjects in general) have what types of access to specific resources (resources are represented as objects in modern operating systems).

In a computer system processes typically collaborate to perform some activity or call each other to request services. Process invocations occur through ...