Component security - issues and an approach

Security vulnerabilities posed by third-party software components in component based development (CBD) is a serious impediment to its adoption in areas that offer great economic potential, particularly in areas such as embedded software and large-scale enterprise software. They raise questions about reliability and integrity of components, as well as the risks posed by any malicious code. This paper is a discussion of factors that affect component security and ways of assuring component security. Using a simplified model of sendmail, it also outlines a formal framework that fits in with communicating sequential processes (CSP) for modelling and analysis of component security.