Patent ID: 7698731

Claim:
A security architecture comprising: an electronic device having an operating system, the operating system residing in an execution environment having a user space and a protected memory space residing in a computer memory of the electronic device; a policy tree residing in the protected memory space of the computer memory and storing a plurality of security policies, each security policy defining at least one system call which correlates to a security operation and a corresponding security component for executing the security operation, wherein said policy tree represents complete paths of system calls to a file or directory, in which nodes store the security policies and security components for implementing the security, wherein a system call is requested from an application to the operating system, and wherein the request is handled by the kernel of the operating system; a policy manager embodied as computer executable instructions in the protected memory space of the computer memory, the policy manager adapted to intercept a system call made to the operating system and operable to determine an applicable response by searching and interpreting the policy tree; and an event manager to intercept system calls made to the operating system and operable to determine if the system call may be handled by the architecture.