Drawing the Red Line in Java
Godmar Back and
Wilson Hsieh
{gback|wilson}@cs.utah.edu
The Flux Research Group
University of Utah Department of Computer Science
50 Central Campus Drive, 3190 MEB, Salt Lake City, Utah 84112
Abstract
Software-based protection has become a viable alternative to
hardware-based protection in systems based on languages such as
Java, but the absence of hardware mechanisms for protection has
been coupled with an absence of a user/kernel boundary. We show
why such a "red line" must be present in order for a Java virtual
machine to be as effective and as reliable as an operating system.
We discuss how the red line can be implemented using software
mechanisms, and explain the ones we use in the Java system that
we are building.
Full paper
presented at and appears in Proceedings of the
Seventh IEEE Workshop on
Hot Topics in Operating Systems, March 1999: