Section: Overall Objectives
Overall Objectives
The research in Moscova centers around the theory and practice of concurrent programming in the context of distributed and mobile systems. The ambitious long-term goal of this research is the programming of the web or, more generally, the programming of global computations on top of wide-area networks.
The scientific focus of the project-team is the design of programming languages and the analysis and conception of constructs for security. While there have been decades of work on concurrent programming, concurrent programming is still delicate. Moreover new problems arise from environments now present with the common use of the Internet, since distributed systems have become heavily extensible and reconfigurable.
The design of a good language for concurrency, distribution and mobility remains an open problem. On one hand, industrial languages such as Java and C# allow downloading of programs, but do not permit migrations of active programs. On the other hand, several prototype languages (Facile [29] , Obliq, Nomadic Pict [28] , Jocaml, etc) have been designed; experimental implementations have also been derived from formal models (Join-calculus, Ambients, Klaim, Acute, etc). None of these prototypes has yet the status of a real programming language.
A major obstacle to the wide deployment of these prototype languages is the security concerns raised by computing in open environments. The security research addressed in our project-team is targeted to programming languages. It is firstly concerned by type-safe marshaling for communicating data between different run-times of programming languages; it is also related to the definition of dynamic linking and rebinding in run-times; it deals with versioning of libraries in programming languages; it is finally connected to access control to libraries and the safe usage of functions in these libraries.
We are also interested by theoretical frameworks and the design of programming constructs for transaction-based systems, which are relevant in a distributed environment. A theory of reversible process calculus has been studied in that direction.
On the software side, we pursue the development of Jocaml with additional constructs for object-oriented programming. Although the development of Jocaml is rather slow, due to the departure of several implementers and to interests in other topics, Jocaml remains one of our main objective in the next years.
OTT – one tool for the working semanticist – is still under development with a growing set of users. A prototype for secure multiparty sessions has been developped in collaboration with Microsoft Research (MSR) Cambridge. A suite of tools for analysis of weak memory models is also under construction in our group.
In 2009, Pierre-Malo Deniélou left for Imperial College, London (he will defend his PhD on 25 January 2010). Karthik Bhargavan (previously at MSR Cambridge) has now an INRIA CR1 position at Moscova. Jérémy Planul (ENS-Lyon and MPRI) accomplished his first year of PhD. Jade Alglave and Nataliya Guts starts their third year of PhD.
Since August 2006, J.-J. Lévy is also director of the Microsoft Research-INRIA Joint Centre, in Orsay. J. Leifer, P.-M. Deniélou and F. Zappa Nardelli are also active in this centre, as members of the Secure Distributed Computations and their Proofs , headed by C. Fournet (Many members of the Joint Centre are former members of project-team Moscova).
Finally, we pursue the project PARSEC, funded by the ANR (Agence Nationale de la Recherche ), together with MIMOSA, EVEREST, LANDE project-teams of INRIA and the team of Roberto Amadio at CNRS-PPS, U. of Paris 7. This project is coordinated by G. Boudol.
