June 25, 2006

FC++3 - Dr Mark Miller - Robust Composition: Towards a Unified Approach to Access Control and Concurrency Control

Financial cryptographer Mark Miller has finished his PhD thesis, formally entitled Robust Composition: Towards a Unified Approach to Access Control and Concurrency Control.

This is a milestone! The thrust of Dr Miller's work could be termed as "E: a language for financial cryptography applications." Another way of looking at it could be "Java without the bugs" but that is probably cutting it short.

If this stuff was in widespread usage, we would probably reduce our threat surface area by 2 orders of magnitude. You probably wouldn't need to read the other two papers at all, if.

http://www.erights.org/talks/thesis/
http://www.caplet.com/

Abstract

When separately written programs are composed so that they may cooperate, they may instead destructively interfere in unanticipated ways. These hazards limit the scale and functionality of the software systems we can successfully compose. This dissertation presents a framework for enabling those interactions between components needed for the cooperation we intend, while minimizing the hazards of destructive interference.

Great progress on the composition problem has been made within the object paradigm, chiefly in the context of sequential, single-machine programming among benign components. We show how to extend this success to support robust composition of concurrent and potentially malicious components distributed over potentially malicious machines. We present E, a distributed, persistent, secure programming language, and CapDesk, a virus-safe desktop built in E, as embodiments of the techniques we explain.

Advisor: Jonathan S. Shapiro, Ph.D.

Readers: Scott Smith, Ph.D., Yair Amir, Ph.D.

Presented here as the lead article in FC++. Mark's generous licence:

Copyright © 2006, Mark Samuel Miller. All rights reserved.
Permission is hereby granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this document without royalty or fee. Permission is granted to quote excerpts from this documented provided the original source is properly cited.
Posted by iang at June 25, 2006 01:00 PM | TrackBack
Comments

I don't want to detract from the topic, but couldn't he have picked a name that isn't already in use for a computer language? Confused me a lot for the first seconds of reading.


Posted by: Josef K. at June 25, 2006 06:43 PM

Josef, I don't follow -- can you specify which names you are referring to here? (As an observation, as a published thesis, I don't think there is much scope for renaming things at this stage, but it is as well to be aware of potential misunderstandings.)

Posted by: Iang at June 26, 2006 07:22 AM
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