Yeah I suppose it's not really tractable to automatically infer the total behavior of a program (halting problem?)... I had some kind of weird strace like mecha

Yeah I suppose it's not really tractable to automatically infer the total behavior of a program (halting problem?)... I had some kind of weird strace like mechanism in mind.. Perhaps static analysis to see which library functions are linked in the package (require symbols in all binaries) and then having a set of default policies per-package based on those (including like you said, "this program never calls X, is not in category Y, therefore it doesn't need to be able to write to /path/to/Z" and so on).. I dunno. Ideas