Hey, I finally made it. After seeking for more help on the felix list (didn’t help any) I got into the problem and solved it. Here is the complete set of what you need to get around the issue of an system.exit in your Bundle.

First of all you need to configure the availability of a SecurityManager with your Framework. Now the following Changes should work both with Equinox and Felix.
The second thing you need to know about is the PermissionAdmin Service Specification.

Configuration using Equinox

Hey, finally Felix is running with security also 🙂
No big changes needed.
As mentioned before the

org/apache/felix/org.apache.felix.security/1.4.0/
org.apache.felix.framework.security-1.4.0.jar=1

is neede within the startup config (Equinox didn’t need this one)
The custom.properties are setup only contain the org.osgi.framework.security=osgi
entry and the system.properties only contain this:

java.security.policy=${karaf.base}/etc/all.policy

java.security.manager

An additional File called security.policy is also added to the etc folder, but somehow the content doesn’t seem to be parsed, even though the SecurityManager of Felix should consume this file.
Anyway here is the content I added to the file:

DENY {
( java.lang.RuntimePermission "exitVM")
}
ALLOW {
( java.security.AllPermission "*" "*")
}


After failing the last time I did some more research on how to get the security manager enabled.
Lukily I found some discussion about this issue on a mailinglist.
I resolved this issue at least with the equinox framework. The Felix didn’t work yet. I will do some more in depth research on this later on.

Now how do we get this SecurityManager running with the Equinox OSGi Container?
We need another parameter specialized for Equinox. So we end up with a custom.properties file that has the following entries:

karaf.framework=equinox

org.osgi.framework.security=osgi


The critical entries are set in the system.properties

java.security.policy=${karaf.base}/etc/all.policy

One thing beforehand, calling system.exit from a bundle is evil!
But even worse is a third party legacy jar calling system.exit instead of throwing exceptions. Now how do we stop this jar from doing such evil?
The only way you can do this is to use a SecurityManager preventing calls to system.exit. Wow!!!
Now how am I supposed to do something like that in an OSGi world?
This is where the security bundle of felix comes in place.