SAFEDPI: A language for controlling mobile code

Abstract

safeDpi is a distributed version of the Picalculus, in which processes are located at dynamically created sites. Parametrised code may be sent between sites using so-called ports, which are essentially higher-order versions of Picalculus communication channels. A host location may protect itself by only accepting code which conforms to a given type associated to the incoming port. We de ne a sophisticated static type system for these ports, which restrict the capabilities and access rights of any processes launched by incoming code. Dependent and existential types are used to add exibility, allowing the behaviour of these launched processes, encoded as process types, to depend on the host's instantiation of the incoming code. We also show that a natural contextually de ned behavioural equivalence can be characterised coinductively, using bisimulations based on typed actions. The characterisation is based on the idea of knowledge acquisition by a testing environment and makes explicit some of the subtleties of determining equivalence in this language of highly constrained distributed code.