Evaluating the Flexibility of the Java Sandbox Zack Coker, Michael Maass, Tianyuan Ding, Claire Le Goues, and Joshua Sunshine Carnegie Mellon University {zfc,mmaass}@cs.cmu.edu,
[email protected], {clegoues,sunshine}@cs.cmu.edu ABSTRACT should protect both the host application and machine from The ubiquitously-installed Java Runtime Environment (JRE) malicious behavior. In practice, these security mechanisms provides a complex, flexible set of mechanisms that support are problematically buggy such that Java malware is often the execution of untrusted code inside a secure sandbox. able to alter the sandbox's settings [4] to override security However, many recent exploits have successfully escaped the mechanisms. Such exploits take advantage of defects in either sandbox, allowing attackers to infect numerous Java hosts. the JRE itself or the application's sandbox configuration to We hypothesize that the Java security model affords devel- disable the security manager, the component of the sandbox opers more flexibility than they need or use in practice, and responsible for enforcing the security policy [5, 6, 7, 8]. thus its complexity compromises security without improving In this paper, we investigate this disconnect between theory practical functionality. We describe an empirical study of the and practice. We hypothesize that it results primarily from ways benign open-source Java applications use and interact unnecessary complexity and flexibility in the design and with the Java security manager. We found that developers engineering of Java's security mechanisms. For example, regularly misunderstand or misuse Java security mechanisms, applications are allowed to change the security manager at that benign programs do not use all of the vast flexibility runtime, whereas static-only configuration of the manager afforded by the Java security model, and that there are clear would be more secure.