[cap-talk] SCOLL : A Language for Safe Capability Based Collaboration

[Yves Jaradin]

Hi all,

We submitted a paper to the POPL06 conference 
(http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~dpw/popl/06/).

Title:
SCOLL : A Language for Safe Capability Based Collaboration

Authors:
Yves Jaradin, Fred Spiessens and Peter Van Roy

Abstract:
In capability secure systems it is important to understand the restrictive
influence programmed entities (e.g. procedures, objects,
modules, components) have on the propagation of influence in a
program. We explain why Take-Grant systems are not sufficiently
expressive for this task, and we provide a new formalism – Authority
Reduction systems (AR-systems) – to model collaborative propagation.
AR-systems provide safe and tractable approximations of
adequate precision for the confinement properties in configurations
of collaborating entities.
We propose a domain specific declarative language – SCOLL
(Safe COLlaboration Language) – to express the collaborative behavior
of subjects, the initial conditions in a configuration, and the
requirements about confinement and liveness that are to be ensured.
We provide the syntactic structure and an operational and denotational
semantics for the language. From experiments with a first
implementation, we provide a preliminary result and show how patterns
for capability based collaboration can be analyzed and generated.

URL:
http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~yjaradin/SCOLL.pdf

All comments are welcome.

Cheers,
Yves


--
Yves Jaradin
Assistant/Researcher
Université Catholique de Louvain
Louvain-la-Neuve
Belgium