Security-By-Contract for the Future Internet

With the advent of the next generation java servlet on the smartcard, the Future Internet will be composed by web servers and clients silently yet busily running on high end smart cards in our phones and our wallets. In this brave new world we can no longer accept the current security model where programs can be downloaded on our machines just because they are vaguely “trusted”. We want to know what they do in more precise details.

We claim that the Future Internet needs the notion of

security-by-contract

: In a nutshell, a contract describes the security relevant interactions that the smart internet application could have with the smart devices hosting them. Compliance with contracts should verified at development time, checked at depolyment time and contracts should be accepted by the platform before deployment and possibly their enforcement guaranteed, for instance by in-line monitoring.

In this paper we describe the challenges that must be met in order to develop a security-by-contract framework for the Future Internet and how security research can be changed by it.