Dr. Paolina Centonze, Computer Science, is the lead inventor of two new patents.

Patent 8,006,233, “System and Method for the Automatic Verification of Privileged-asserting and Subject-executed Code” introduces a program-analysis solution for verifying code that performs declassification and/or endorsement.

Patent 8,230,477, “System and Method for the Automatic Evaluation of Existing Security Policies and Automatic Creation of New Security Policies” describes how to automatically generate access-control policies that are neither too permissive nor too restrictive, or how to verify that existing policies satisfy such property.

Both patents are owned by IBM Corporation, and were recently granted by the US Patent and Trademark Office. For this work, Dr. Centonze received a Patent Issue Award from IBM.

System and method for the automatic verification of privilege-asserting and subject-executed code

Abstract
The present relates to a method for verifying privileged and subject-executed code within a program, the method further comprising the steps of constructing a static model of a program, identifying checkPermission nodes that are comprised within the invocation graph, and performing a fixed-point iteration, wherein each determined permission set is propagated backwards across the nodes of the static model until a privilege-asserting code node is reached. The method further comprises the steps of associating each node of the invocation graph with a set of Permission allocation sites, analyzing each identified privilege-asserting code node and subject-executing code node to determine the Permission allocation site set that is associated with each privilege-asserting code node and subject-executing code node, and determining the cardinality of a Permission allocation-site set that is associated with each privilege-asserting code node and subject-executing code node.

View full text of Patent 8,006,233 here.

System and method for the automatic evaluation of existing security policies and automatic creation of new security policies

Abstract
The present invention relates to methodologies for combining policy analysis and static analysis of code and thereafter determining whether the permissions granted by the policy to the code and to the subjects executing it are appropriate. In particular, this involves the verification that too many permissions have not been granted (wherein this would be a violation of the Principle of Least Privilege), and that the permissions being granted are sufficient to execute the code without run-time authorization failures, thus resulting in the failure of the program to execute.

View full text of Patent 8,230,477 here.