Draft FC'00 Paper, please rip to shreads (or at least comment)

[Mark S. Miller]

http://www.erights.org/elib/capability/ode/index.html is a draft of a paper
I'm writing for Financial Cryptography '00 http://www.fc00.cs.uwm.edu/ .
The deadline for the paper has mercifully been extended till October 7th,
meaning that it's now possible for me to have this paper ready on time.  I
need feedback!  I only have about half the paper posted there right now, and
will send out notices as I post the remaining sections.  Please comment
either with crit, by email, or by phone.  Sorry about this, but if you want
to respond by phone, please email me either with your phone number, or to
request mine.

Anyone who makes enough useful suggestions will we included as a co-author
if they wish.


The Title and Abstract of the paper are:


                                The Fundamental Diagram
                             from Five Compatible Perspectives

 From simple abstractions, great power can bloom. Sometimes, this power comes
not so much from generating new intuitions, as from showing the synergy
possible between intuitions developed separately by disjoint communities.
For example, Shannon's formalization of the notion of information built a
bridge between the electrical engineer's intuitions about signals,
encodings, and noise, and the mechanical engineer's intuitions about
temperature and thermodynamic efficiency.

A similar bridge is being built by some in the object programming community,
the capability-based secure operating systems community, and the financial
cryptography community. Historically

   * objects have been strong on abstraction and composition,
   * operating systems have been strong on using a common platform to prevent
     malicious code from doing damage to others,
   * and financial cryptography have been strong on cooperative protocols
     allowing mutually suspicious parties to trade a diversity of rights, 
in the
     absence of a mutually-trusted platform.

Unfortunately, each has been weak in the areas where the other two are
strong. By bridging the intuitions of these communities, we can engineer
systems synergistically strong in all three ways. The developing bridge
reported by this paper is based on a joint appreciation of a common
abstraction, shown here as the Fundamental Diagram.

We present the Fundamental Diagram from five perspectives, artificially
organized into a tower of five levels.

    1.As the basic step of Object Computation.
    2.As the foundation for Capability Security.
    3.As a cryptographic Uber-Protocol, subsuming the needs for many
       particular cryptographic protocols.
    4.As the core Game-Rule for secure computation as vast multi-player game.
    5.As material from which to build a diversity of Financial Bearer
       Instruments.

Even with a diagram seemingly this simple, within the allowed space for this
paper, to explore so many perspectives we can only touch upon each
perspective briefly. As a first presentation to unify these perspectives, we
have chosen breadth over depth. Hopefully our references and future papers
will eventually provide the needed depth as well.


-----------------------------------------------------------
Due to a bug (possibly at my ISP, but probably in Eudora 4.2.0.58), on 9/15
I lost 18 email messages.  If it's possible for you to check whether you
sent me something on that date, resending it would be great.  Otherwise,
please excuse my non-responsiveness to email you may have sent around that
time.  Sorry for the inconvenience, and thanks.

         Cheers,
         --MarkM