Dynamic Channel Screening in the Higher Order π-Calculus
José-Luis Vivas, Nobuko Yoshida · Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science · 2002
Recently programming languages have been designed to support mobile code, i.e. higher-order code that is transferred from a remote location or domain and executed within the local environment. This may expose the internal interfaces and objects within a location to attacks by mobile code. In this work, we propose an extension of notations based on the Higher-Order π-calculus with primitive operators, called screening operators, whose role is to protect internal interfaces by dynamically restricting the visibility of channels. The usefulness of these operators is illustrated by applications involving resource access control. We show how restrictions on resource access control can be enforced dynamically in terms of screening operators, and contrast it with an alternative approach in which restrictions on the behaviour of processes are based on the notion of process type [17] and intended to be checked statically.