1. A security architecture for accessing security components associated with an operating system, the operating system residing in an execution environment having a user space and a protected memory space, comprising: a policy tree 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; and a policy manager adapted to intercept system calls made to the operating system and operable to determine an applicable response based on the policy tree, wherein the policy tree and the policy manager reside in a protected memory space of the execution environment.