Patterns of safe collaboration

When practicing secure programming, it is important to understand the restrictive influence programmed entities have on the propagation of authority in a program. To precisely model authority propagation in patterns of interacting entities, we present a new formalism Knowledge Behavior Models (KBM). To describe such patterns, we present a new domain specific declarative language SCOLL (Safe Collaboration Language), which semantics are expressed by means of KBMs. To calculate the solutions for the safety problems expressed in SCOLL, we have built SCOLLAR: a model checker and solver based on constraint logic programming. SCOLLAR not only indicates whether the safety requirements are guaranteed by the restricted behavior of the relied-upon entities, but also lists the different ways in which their behavior can be restricted to guarantee the safety properties without precluding their required functionality and (re-)usability. How the tool can help programmers to build reliable components that can safely interact with partially or completely untrusted components is shown in elaborate examples.