AOP
Learning objectives
- understand the cross-cutting nature of security;
- know how to implement security functionality by aspect-oriented programming techniques;
- understand potential vulnerabilities aspect-oriented programming introduces.
Overview
Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) is a development paradigm that focuses on improving the modularization of cross-cutting concerns. Over the last decade, it has received a great deal of attention from both the academic and the industrial community. AOP has been shown to bring a number of software engineering benefits. However, the security implications of AOP are less clear. Whether AOP can be used to build secure software is the key question addressed in this session.
In this presentation we first discuss how AOP can be used to implement security controls. Thereafter, we elaborate on a number of security implications of AOP. Risks will be shown to originate from the core concepts of AOP, as well as from tool-specific implementation strategies. In the tool arena, we specifically focus on AspectJ. The presentation concludes by indicating how these risks can be mitigated, both from a theoretical and from a practical perspective.
