Immutability offers several benefits such as thread-safety, prevention against inadvertent modification of fields, and malicious tampering. Class invariants and state of immutable objects are always consistent with their requirements, so no defensive copying is necessary while accepting input or returning values is unnecessary. However, sometimes it is not possible sometimes impossible to make sensitive classes immutable. Fortunately, there is a mechanism that allows code to expose mutable classes to untrusted code by granting read-only access. This is largely achieved through unmodifiable wrappers. For example, the Collection classes include a set of wrappers that allow clients to observe an unmodifiable view of a Collection object.
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An untrusted invoker may call the mutator method setArray() and violate the object's immutability property. Invoking the getter method getArray() also allows modification of the private internal state of the class. This is because this class also violates OBJ05-J. Defensively copy private mutable class members before returning their references.
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In general, sensitive classes can be transformed into safe-view objects by providing appropriate wrappers for all the methods defined by the core interface, including the mutator methods. The wrappers for the mutator methods need to must throw an UnsupportedOperationException so that clients cannot perform operations that affect the immutability property of the object.
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The MutableProtector wrapper class overrides the getArray() method, and clones the array. So while Although calling code gets a copy of the mutable object's array, the original array remains unchanged and inaccessible. The setArray() method is also overridden and throws to throw an exception if the caller attempts to use this method on the returned object. This object can be passed to untrusted code as requiredwhen read-access to the data is permissible.
Applicability
Failure to provide an unmodifiable safe-view of a sensitive mutable object to untrusted code can lead to malicious tampering and corruption of the object.
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