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The Virtual Machine is viewed by many as inherently insecure despite all the efforts to improve its security. This invention provides methods, apparatus, and computer products to implement a system that provides operating system style protection for code. Although applicable to many language systems, the invention is described for a system employing the Java language. Hardware protection domains are used to separate Java classes, provide access control on cross domain method invocations, efficient data sharing between protection domains, and memory and CPU resource control. Apart from the performance impact, these security measures are all transparent to the Java programs, even when a subclass is in one domain and its superclass is in another, when they do not violate the policy. To reduce the performance impact, classes are grouped and shared between protection domains and map data lazily as …