Types for coordinating secure behavioural variations

Abstract

Context-Oriented programming languages provide us with primitive constructs to adapt program behaviour depending on the evolution of their operational environment. We are interested here in software components, the behaviour of which depend on the following: their actual operating context; the security policies that control accesses to their resources and the potential interactions with the external environment. For that, we extend a core functional language with mechanisms to program behavioural variations, to manipulate resources and to enforce security policies over both variations and resource usages. Additionally, there are message passing primitives to interact with the environment, also subject to a simple policy. Changes of the operational context are triggered both by the program and by the exchanged messages. Besides a definition of the dynamic semantics, we introduce a static analysis for guaranteeing programs to safely operate in any admissible context, and to correctly interact with the environment they comply with. © 2012 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.