In the software development world, assures are an essential part of creating secure systems and ensuring that data is safe from potential breaches. In this post, I’ll provide a brief tutorial on developing this type of assurance using Java.
The concept behind developing assurers is relatively straightforward: we want to ensure that all operations a program is executing are valid ones, guaranteeing that data hasn’t been altered and remains secure. To achieve this, we need to define a few basic elements.
First, we need to define a context. Every program will operate in a particular environment, so this should be accounted for. Typically, this encompasses variables like settings, environment, hardware, etc.
Context context = new Context("dev", "solaris", "8GB",
"4 processor"
);
Next, we need to define a set of valid operations for the program to perform and validate against the context. These operations define what the program should be allowed to do at the given time. For example, a program with a particular priority may only be allowed to delete from one specific table, or access certain fields from an array.
ArrayList<Operation> operations = new ArrayList<>();
operations.add(new Operation("READ", "Table_A"));
operations.add(new Operation("WRITE", "Table_B"));
Finally, we must define what the assurance itself needs to do. This can include verifying that the data hasn’t been altered, or authenticating the user.
Assurance assurance = new Assurance(context, operations); assurance.verifyDataIntegrity(); assurance.authenticateUser();
Once all the elements of the assurance have been defined, we need to create an instance of the assurance class and pass it the context and operations. From here, we can begin calling methods on the assurance to perform the necessary validations and actions.
Hopefully this short tutorial has been useful in showing you how to create an assurance in Java. Thanks for taking the time to read!