Practical implementation techniques of ambient calculus in conventional dynamic languages

This paper is about a concrete implementation of Safe Ambients (SA) in a conventional dynamic language that can be used for practical distributed programming. Although there have been several studies about the distributed implementation of SA, these implementations have involved the use of special-purpose abstract machines. Specifically, network communication mechanisms supporting secure packets and mobile codes are assumed to be embedded in the abstract machines at a high-level of communication abstraction. Furthermore, the interpretation of Safe Ambient programs by the abstract machine incurs significant runtime overheads. To overcome such problems, we propose a compiler from SA to the higher-order applied π-calculus, which has constructs for explicitly representing both cryptographic communication and code migration. The compiled code can be easily translated to the actual code in any dynamic programming language that supports the standard network communication and eval. Furthermore, by taking advantage of the low-level representation of the generated code, we discuss several security concerns related to the secure implementation of SA in public networks.