The Security Manager

A security manager is an object that defines a security policy for an application. This policy specifies actions that are unsafe or sensitive. Any actions not allowed by the security policy cause a SecurityException to be thrown. An application can also query its security manager to discover which actions are allowed.

Typically, a web applet runs with a security manager provided by the browser or Java Web Start plugin. Other kinds of applications normally run without a security manager, unless the application itself defines one. If no security manager is present, the application has no security policy and acts without restrictions.

This section explains how an application interacts with an existing security manager. For more detailed information, including information on how to design a security manager, refer to the Security Guide.

Interacting with the Security Manager

The security manager is an object of type SecurityManager; to obtain a reference to this object, invoke System.getSecurityManager.

SecurityManager appsm = System.getSecurityManager();

If there is no security manager, this method returns null.

Once an application has a reference to the security manager object, it can request permission to do specific things. Many classes in the standard libraries do this. For example, System.exit, which terminates the Java virtual machine with an exit status, invokes SecurityManager.checkExit to ensure that the current thread has permission to shut down the application.

The SecurityManager class defines many other methods used to verify other kinds of operations. For example, SecurityManager.checkAccess verifies thread accesses, and SecurityManager.checkPropertyAccess verifies access to the specified property. Each operation or group of operations has its own checkXXX() method.

In addition, the set of checkXXX() methods represents the set of operations that are already subject to the protection of the security manager. Typically, an application does not have to directly invoke any checkXXX() methods.

Recognizing a Security Violation

Many actions that are routine without a security manager can throw a SecurityException when run with a security manager. This is true even when invoking a method that isn't documented as throwing SecurityException. For example, consider the following code used to read a file:

reader = new FileReader("xanadu.txt");

In the absence of a security manager, this statement executes without error, provided xanadu.txt exists and is readable. But suppose this statement is inserted in a web applet, which typically runs under a security manager that does not allow file input. The following error messages might result:

appletviewer fileApplet.html
Exception in thread "AWT-EventQueue-1" java.security.AccessControlException: access denied (java.io.FilePermission characteroutput.txt write)
 at java.security.AccessControlContext.checkPermission(AccessControlContext.java:323)
 at java.security.AccessController.checkPermission(AccessController.java:546)
 at java.lang.SecurityManager.checkPermission(SecurityManager.java:532)
 at java.lang.SecurityManager.checkWrite(SecurityManager.java:962)
 at java.io.FileOutputStream.<init>(FileOutputStream.java:169)
 at java.io.FileOutputStream.<init>(FileOutputStream.java:70)
 at java.io.FileWriter.<init>(FileWriter.java:46)
...

Note that the specific exception thrown in this case, java.security.AccessControlException, is a subclass of SecurityException.