Abstract Global Types and Network Services

Mobility seems to be a fundamental aspect for global computing, however it gives rise to a lot of relevant security problems. We address the problem of protecting hosts from attacks or misbehavior of mobile processes. We propose to move process abstractions, i.e. process parameterized with respect to the operations having a local meaning, instead of processes ready-to-run or active processes (agents). Moreover, we exploit global values and types to ensure that operations having a local meaning are used only locally. Our approach is general and could be applied to every language/system for programming and coordinating network services that permits remote communications with transmission of code fragments. We illustrate our approach by using the Klaim language, where the network services are codified by means of tuples inside network service repositories, as, e.g., in SUN JavaSpace and IBM TSpace.