The Oz-E project : design guidelines for a secure multiparadigm programming language

The design and implementation of a capability secure multi-paradigm language should be guided from its conception by proven principles of secure language design. In this position paper we present the Oz-E project, aimed at building an Oz-like secure language, named in tribute of E [MMF00] and its designers and users who contributed greatly to the ideas presented here. We synthesize the principles for secure language design from the experiences with the capability-secure languages E and the W7-kernel for Scheme 48 [Ree96]. These principles will be used as primary guidelines during the project. We propose a layered structure for Oz-E and discuss some important security concerns, without aiming for completeness at this early stage

A practical formal model for safety analysis in capability-based systems

We present a formal system that models programmable abstractions for access control. Composite abstractions and patterns of arbitrary complexity are modeled as a configuration of communicating subjects. The subjects in the model can express behavior that corresponds to how information and authority are propagated in capability systems. The formalism is designed to be useful for analyzing how information and authority are confined in arbitrary configurations, but it will also be useful in the reverse sense, to calculate the necessary restrictions in a subject’s behavior when a global confinement policy is given. We introduce a subclass of these systems we call ”saturated”, that can provide safe and tractable approximations for the safety properties in arbitrary configurations of collaborating entities