Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Accelerator Supplements

Software systems in the Internet era carry out computation on behalf of multiple principals.  Mobile code, scriptable applications and plug-in architectures all involve the execution of untrusted program fragments alongside trusted ones.  More than ever, we find within a single process multiple code units that are mutually suspicious of one another.  In layman's language, the left hand does not trust the right.  There is thus an increasing demand for programming environments to assume the security posture of a multiprogramming operating system, providing protection mechanisms that arbitrate the interaction of code units within a single application.  The advent of the Java platform and the .Net framework is concrete evidence of thistrend.This proposal describes my plan to develop novel and practical programming language abstractions for exercising access control at the programming language level, with the objective of addressing the unique security challenges presented by dynamically extensible systems.