How languages can save distributed computing
POPL '13 Proceedings of the 40th annual ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages
Preventing accidental data disclosure in modern operating systems
Proceedings of the 2013 ACM SIGSAC conference on Computer & communications security
Toward general diagnosis of static errors
Proceedings of the 41st ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages
Warranties for faster strong consistency
NSDI'14 Proceedings of the 11th USENIX Conference on Networked Systems Design and Implementation
| Hi-index | 0.00 |
Mobile code is now a nearly inescapable component of modern computing, thanks to client-side code that runs within web browsers. The usual tension between security and functionality is particularly acute in a mobile-code setting, and current platforms disappoint on both dimensions. We introduce a new architecture for secure mobile code, with which developers can use, publish, and share mobile code securely across trust domains. This architecture enables new kinds of distributed applications, and makes it easier to reuse and evolve code from untrusted providers. The architecture gives mobile code considerable expressive power: it can securely access distributed, persistent, shared information from multiple trust domains, unlike web applications bound by the same-origin policy. The core of our approach is analyzing how flows of information within mobile code affect confidentiality and integrity. Because mobile code is untrusted, this analysis requires novel constraints on information flow and authority. We show that these constraints offer principled enforcement of strong security while avoiding the limitations of current mobile-code security mechanisms. We evaluate our approach by demonstrating a variety of mobile-code applications, showing that new functionality can be offered along with strong security.