Inside Java™ 2 Platform Security: Architecture, API Design, and Implementation, Second Edition

Chapter 6. Enforcing Security Policy

If effectively enforced, the law confers a real and great good.

—Theodore Roosevelt

The previous chapter describes how security policy, telling what permissions are granted to various groups of code with various characteristics, is specified separately from the Java runtime environment and represented at runtime within a Policy object. That chapter documents classes used to characterize code, both code granted permissions by the policy and code that is running and whose permissions will need to be checked by consulting the policy whenever a security-sensitive resource access is attempted.

This chapter focuses on how the security policy is enforced. The chapter describes the classes involved in enforcement ...