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International Conference on Information and Communications Security

ICICS 1999: Information and Communication Security pp 39–53Cite as

Extending Erlang for Safe Mobile Code Execution

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 1726))

Abstract

This paper discusses extensions to the functional language Erlang which provide a secure execution environment for remotely sourced code. This is in contrast to much existing work which has focused on securing procedural languages. Using a language such as Erlang provides a high degree of inherent run-time safety, which means effort can be focused on providing a suitable degree of system safety. We found that the main changes needed were the use of unforgeable (capability) references with access rights to control the use of system resources; the provision of a hierarchy of execution nodes to provide custom views of the resources available and to impose utilisation limits; and support for remote module loading. We then discuss prototype implementations of these changes, used to evaluate their utility and impact on visibility for the users of the language, and mention work in progress using this foundation to specify safety policies by filtering messages to server processes.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer Science, Australian Defence Force Academy, Canberra, 2600, Australia

    Lawrie Brown

  2. Computer Science Laboratory, Ericsson Utvecklings AB, S-125 25, Älvsjö, Sweden

    Dan Sahlin

Authors
  1. Lawrie Brown
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  2. Dan Sahlin
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia

    Vijay Varadharajan

  2. Centre for Computer and Information Security Research School of Computer Science and Software Engineering, University of Wollongong, Australia

    Yi Mu

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© 1999 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Brown, L., Sahlin, D. (1999). Extending Erlang for Safe Mobile Code Execution. In: Varadharajan, V., Mu, Y. (eds) Information and Communication Security. ICICS 1999. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1726. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-47942-0_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-47942-0_5

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-66682-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-47942-0

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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