Track: CONCURRENCY & INTEGRITY / Time: Tuesday 14:45 - 15:45 / Location: Filuren, Musikhuset

Just as we should not expect our base programming language to provide all the data types we need, so we should not expect our security foundation to provide all the abstractions we need to express security policy. The answer to both is the same: We need foundations that provide simple abstraction mechanisms, which we use to build an open ended set of abstractions, which we then use to express policy. The abstraction mechanisms provided by object-capabilities are familiar from object-oriented programming: encapsulation, message-passing, polymorphism, and interposition. Using only these simple object concepts, we show how to build abstractions for confinement, rights amplification, transitive wrapping and revocation, responsibility tracking, and smart contracts.

 

Keywords: Patterns, robust, secure, standard, object-capabilities

Target audience: Programmers interested in writing secure code expressing security abstractions and policies.