[cap-talk] Backwater: some small progress

[Fred Spiessens]

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Op 29-apr-07, om 02:55 heeft Matej Kosik het volgende geschreven:

> I like the idea that applications (in my case untrusted modules)  
> should declare the authority they need in order to be able to what  
> is expected from them. I would like to evaluate SCOLL, whether it  
> can be used for these purposes, if it can bring something that is  
> not obvious. I am far from that now yet, because the two problems I  
> mentioned in my previous mail

Hi Matej,

It was (is) my intention to use SCOLL for exactly that purpose.

 From seciion 11.4.1 of my thesis: "SCOLL Carrying Code"
In analogy to abstraction carrying code [HALGP05] and model carrying  
code [SRRS01],  source code could also be adorned with a SCOLL model  
and a proof that the model  safely approximates the actual code. A  
simple and fast automated inspection of the proof would reveal its  
validity: whether the SCOLL model is indeed a safe approximation of  
the program. Integration of several such programs would result in a  
composed SCOLL model of which we can immediately inspect the safety  
properties.
The approach could provide automated acceptance or rejection of a  
software component to be integrated into existing software.
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Unfortunately, SCOLLAR would need to improve its scalability to be  
practically applicable in this domain. I am sorry to say that I did  
not make any progress at all recently. I  still hope I will find the  
time in my professional environment to do so soon. Maybe the  
following references can give you a better idea about the feasibility.

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[HALGP05]
Manuel V. Hermenegildo, Elvira Albert, Pedro  López-García, and  
Germán Puebla,. Abstraction carrying code and resource-awareness. In  
PPDP ’05: Proceedings of the 7th
ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Principles and practice of  
declarative programming, pages 1–11, New York, NY, USA, 2005. ACM  
Press. 11.4.1

[SRRS01] R. Sekar, C. R. Ramakrishnan, I. V. Ramakrishnan, and S. A.  
Smolka.  Model-carrying code (mcc): a new paradigm for mobile-code  
security. In NSPW ’01: Proceedings of the 2001 workshop on New  
security paradigms, pages 23–30, New York, NY, USA, 2001. ACM Press.  
11.4.1
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BTW, very interesting line of research!

cheers,
Fred.


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Fred Spiessens
IT Research & Consultancy
Evoluware
http://www.evoluware.eu/



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