On 09/03/2013 04:39 PM, Nick Williams wrote:
>Do you mean sun.reflect.CallerSensitive can go away?  This is very important 
part of the design that we need to detect which methods are caller-sensitive.   I 
keep seeing you suggest this and it is unclear to me if you only mean to remove 
java.lang.@CallerSensitive in your proposal.
Yes, that's what I mean. If you carefully examine the (existing) native code 
that backs getCallerClass, you see that @CallerSensitive is/only/  used as an 
enforcement mechanism. When I first read about @CallerSensitive, I/thought/  
you could take a call stack like this one:

@CallerSensitive getCallerClass()
@CallerSensitive someMethod1()
@CallerSensitive someMethod2()
@CallerSensitive someMethod3()
@CallerSensitive someMethod4()
actualCallerMethod()

And calling getCallerClass would return the class for actualCallerMethod(). 
However, I was wrong. getCallerClass/always/  returns someMethod1(). 
@CallerSensitive is/not/  used to determine when to stop looking for the 
caller. It's just an enforcement mechanism to ensure that only built-in JVM 
classes can call getCallerClass.

*AND* that Reflection.getCallerClass() can only be called from within methods annotated with @CallerSensitive.

Now for that part, the public API equivalent (StackTraceFrame.getCallerClass() or whatever it is called) need not be restricted to methods annotated with any annotation, but that means that this public API should not be used to implement security decisions since MethodHandles API allows caller to be spoofed unless looking-up a method annotated with @CallerSensitive...

  This is/not/  how I did it, this is how it already was. Because of this, you 
could delete the @CallerSensitive annotation completely and getCallerClass 
still be fully functional the way it is. It just wouldn't be restricted to 
annotated methods anymore.

For security unrelated things (like logging and similar) public API need not include any enabling annotation, but it needs to be documented that it should not be used for security decisions.

***

Regarding ability to obtain j.l.Class instances for classes that client code would otherwise have no access to:

What about a simple restriction on methods returning such instances that Class objects are only returned when they are resolvable from the ClassLoader of client code. If they are not resolvable, null is returned. For example, the equivalent of:

public class StackTraceFrame {

    private final Class<?> declaringClass;

    @CallerSensitive
    public Class<?> getDeclaringClass() {
        try {
            return Class.forName(declaringClass.getName(),
                                 false,
Reflection.getCallerClass().getClassLoader())
                   == declaringClass ? declaringClass : null;
            }
        } catch (ClassNotFoundException ignore) {}
        return null;
    }

    // the name can be exposed without fear...
    public String getDeclaringClassName() {
        return declaringClass.getName();
    }


This example could be implemented more efficiently then above code (using private Class/ClassLoader API).

Regards, Peter

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