The Need for Declarative Security Mechanisms

Today, security is recognized as an absolute need in application development. Programming environments offer mechanisms and concepts allowing an easy integration of security mechanisms into the application. However, this often has to be done by hand, resulting in extra effort that has to be made during the development cycle. Furthermore, the code is popped up with statements that enforce application or site-specific security requirements, having negative impact on the reusability and maintainability of the code. The goal of this paper is to promote the usage of declarative security mechanisms which allow the decoupling of security logic completely from the application logic. Furthermore, the framework GAMMA is presented, that offers several declarative authentication, access control, and auditing mechanisms that can be transparently integrated into software applications.