[cap-talk] OCap CORBA, anyone? (was Re: POLA focus seen as counter productive)

[Jed Donnelley]

David Chizmadia (JHU) wrote:
> Jonathan S. Shapiro wrote:
>   
>> I actually think the network area is a lost cause, because it is a
>> solved problem. There is this thing called CORBA...
>>     
>
>     Shap, don't bait the CORBA geek!! :-D
>
>   
>> Now CORBA isn't capabilities. It has no security story and so forth. But
>>     
>
>     It has a security story (CSIv2), but the story sucks :-(
>
>     ... especially in the context of embedded systems!!!
>
>   
>> ...
>
>     As a long-time OMG security participant, I can assure you that
> the people who are actually using CORBA for new development - i.e.,
> the military-industrial complexes in the US and Europe  who are, in
> fact, most interested in embedded systems) are very interested in a
> credible, robust, and scalable network security story for CORBA. The
> major constraint at this point is that at least 30% of the players
> will assume that the underlying OS is based on the MILS architecture.
>   
Thanks for jumping in David!

I wonder if for those of us less familiar with CORBA you could explain to us
why CORBA isn't capability/POLA.  If you have an object request model, e.g.
as I mentioned:

http://www.omg.org/images/logos/diagram-orb_to_orb.gif
(from http://www.omg.org/gettingstarted/corbafaq.htm )

Isn't it a natural needing to be able to send object references as 
parameters in
messages?  At that point don't you have capabilities?

Is there some sort of struggle between the ambient authority model ("user"
defined access control, ambient) and the object model of authority 
(capabilities)?
Doesn't it seem like a relatively minor "push" could at least make the 
capability
model an option of some sort with CORBA?
>     I've actually been trying to figure out how to phrase a proposal
> to this list to take an aggressive lead in reworking CORBA so that
> it is more closely aligned with the Web Calculus (or whatever
> petname it currently uses)
Woo Ha!
> thanks Shap, for providing the opening.
> A major advantage in this area is that one of the most respected
> people in OMG (Jishnu Mukerji) represents HP, so it would be very
> easy for HP Labs to insert itself into the dialogs.
>   
Time perhaps for Alan Karp to speak up?
>     It also turns out that the last OMG meeting of this year (10-14
> Dec) will be in Burlingame, CA. So it would be very local for many
> of the object capability community's major players. The following
> meeting is in Washington, DC.
>
>     If there is any real interest in using OMG as a venue for public
> specifications of OCapCORBA,
Where did the name "OCapCORBA" come from?  Is that your invention David?
> I would be very willing to lobby for
> time on the joint MARS (Middleware And Related Services) and
> Real-time task force agendas.
>
>     Another interesting opportunity is to start formalizing some of
> the lessons learned in creating OCap dialects of legacy languages as
>  a Platform-Independent Model of an OCap programming language
> platform. This would then allow for (semi-)automatic code generation
> based on OCap-based system models.
>   
This sounds like opportunity knocking to me.  I'll be quite interested 
to hear the views
of others on this topic.

--Jed  http://www.webstart.com/jed/
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