[PATCH] 4851444: Exposing sun.reflect.Reflection#getCallerClass as a public API in Java 8

[David M. Lloyd]

On 09/09/2013 04:56 PM, Mandy Chung wrote:
> On 9/9/13 10:01 AM, David M. Lloyd wrote:
>>> I'm not sure if we can be very certain about the depth in a runtime
>>> environment (non-debugging) unless it requires all VM implementation to
>>> support a reliable way to return a frame at a given depth.
>>>
>>> The stack trace is not guaranteed to contain all stack frames. E.g. in
>>> the spec of Throwable.getStackTrace():
>>>
>>>     Some virtual machines may, under some circumstances, omit one or
>>> more
>>>     stack frames from the stack trace. In the extreme case, a virtual
>>> machine
>>>     that has no stack trace information concerning this throwable is
>>>     permitted to return a zero-length array from this method.
>>
>> This is interesting.  Presumably this would tie into tail-call
>> optimizations and that sort of thing?
>>
>> How does AccessControlContext deal with this possibility?
>
> Will need the VM team to answer the details.
>
> ACC only needs protection domains that allow the VM to do some ACC
> optimization, for example, the comment in JVM_GetStackAccessControlContext
>
>    // count the protection domains on the execution stack. We collapse
>    // duplicate consecutive protection domains into a single one, as
>    // well as stopping when we hit a privileged frame.
>
> Also classes on bootclasspath have null protection domain in the VM
> itself that it can bypass permission check on those frames.

Leaving the bootclasspath stuff aside, it would be very useful for (at 
least) security managers to be able to acquire *just* their immediate 
caller's ProtectionDomain without having to worry about spoofing or 
anything like that.  This would definitely solve my security manager use 
case at the very least - it would allow writing privileged versions of 
methods which would not require a slow doPrivileged() call; instead I 
could just check against the immediate caller's permission set.

-- 
- DML