Robust Composition: Towards a Uni ed Approach to Access Control and Concurrency Control
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Date
2006-08-03T15:29:56Z
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Johns Hopkins University
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, chie
y in the context of sequential, single-machine programming among
benign components. We show how to extend this success to support robust composi-
tion 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 tech-
niques we explain.
Description
Keywords
Access control, Concurrency control, Partial failure, Distributed objects, Promise pipelining, Object capabilities