DEVICE DRIVERS

The Role of the Device Driver As a programmer, you will be able to make your own choices about your driver, choosing an acceptable trade-off between the programming time required and the flexibility of the result. Though it may appear strange to say that a driver is “flexible,” we like this word because it emphasizes … Read more

Security Manager vs Access Controller

The access controller has been introduced in the Java 2 platform. Before the access controller existed, the security manager had to rely on its internal logic to determine the security policy needed to be in effect, and any change in the security policy meant changing the security manager itself. Prior to Java 2, implementing customized … Read more

Java 2 Class Loading Mechanism

The class loading mechanism plays a critical role in Java security since the class loader is responsible for locating and fetching the class files, consulting the security policy, and defining the appropriate permissions associated with the class object. In JDK 1.1, local code and correctly signed remote code were generally trusted to have full access … Read more

Java 2 Protection Domain and Permissions Model

A protection domain can be scoped by a set of objects that are currently directly accessible by a principal, where a principal is an entity in the computer system to which permissions are granted. A principal can access objects in the protection domain by virtue of the permissions it enjoys over the objects in the … Read more

Evolution of the Java Security Model

The Java programming language is one of the fastest-growing technologies in use on the Internet today. The principal reason why Java has scored over other languages is the promise that an application written once in Java can be run from any machine that has a JVM. From the early stages of Java development, it was … Read more

The New Java Security Model

The Need for Java Security From its inception, Java has shown that it was designed for the net. Java brought about, for the first time on a large scale, the concept of dynamic loading of code from a source outside the system. Though this is very powerful, and adds several features to the system using … Read more

What is the Internet?

we use the public Internet, a specific computer network (and one which probably most readers have used), as our principle vehicle for discussing computer networking protocols. But what is the Internet? We would like to give you a one-sentence definition of the Internet, a definition that you can take home and share with your family … Read more

What is a Protocol?

Now that we’ve got a bit of a feel for what the “Internet” is, let’s consider another important word is the title of this book: “protocol.” What is a protocol? What does a protocol do? How would you recognize a protocol if you met one? A Human Analogy It is probably easiest to understand the … Read more

Java Cryptography Architecture

JCA is described as a provider architecture. The primary principal in the design of the JCA has been to separate the cryptographic concepts from their algorithmic implementations. It is designed to allow different vendors to provide their own implementation of the cryptographic tools and other administrative functions. This makes a very flexible framework which willcater … Read more

Cryptographic Tools

The derivation of the word cryptography is from Greek and means literally secret writing . Modern cryptography is still involved in keeping data secret, but the ability to authenticate a user (and hence apply some kind of access control) is even more important. Although there are many cryptographic techniques and protocols, they mostly fall into … Read more