New AOP Pointcuts and Primitives for Security Hardening Concerns

In this paper, the authors present new pointcuts and primitives to Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) languages that are needed for systematic hardening of security concerns. The two proposed pointcuts allow to identify particular join points in a program's Control Flow Graph (CFG). The first one is the GAFlow, Closest Guaranteed Ancestor, which returns the closest ancestor join point to the pointcuts of interest that is on all their runtime paths. The second one is the GDFlow, Closest Guaranteed Descendant, which returns the closest child join point that can be reached by all paths starting from the pointcut of interest.