Abstract
In this paper we propose the notion of security-by-contract, a mobile contract that an application carries with itself. The key idea of the framework is that a digital signature should not just certify the origin of the code but rather bind together the code with a contract. We provide a description of the overall life-cycle of mobile code in the setting of security-by-contract, describe a tentative structure for a contractual language and propose a number of algorithms for one of the key steps in the process, the contract-policy matching issue. We argue that security-by-contract would provide a semantics for digital signatures on mobile code thus being a step in the transition from trusted code to trustworthy code.
Research partly supported by the project EU-IST-STREP-S3MS.
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Dragoni, N., Massacci, F., Naliuka, K., Siahaan, I. (2007). Security-by-Contract: Toward a Semantics for Digital Signatures on Mobile Code. In: Lopez, J., Samarati, P., Ferrer, J.L. (eds) Public Key Infrastructure. EuroPKI 2007. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4582. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-73408-6_21
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