This paper presents a new distributed process calculus, called the M-calculus, that can be understood as a higher-order version of the Distributed Join calculus with programmable localities. The calculus retains the implementable character of the Distributed Join calculus while overcoming several important limitations: insufficient control over communication and mobility, absence of dynamic binding, and limited locality semantics. The calculus is equipped with a polymorphic type system that guarantees the unicity of locality names, even in presence of higher-order communications a crucial propertyfor the determinacy of message routing in the calculus.

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 define 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 flexibility, 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 defined 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. 1

www.cs.bu.edu/fac/kfoury The Ambient Calculus was developed by Cardelli and Gordon as a formal framework to study issues of mobility and migrant code [CG98]. We consider an Ambient Calculus where ambients transport and exchange programs rather that just inert data. We propose different senses in which such a calculus can be said to be polymorphically typed, and design accordingly a polymorphic type system for it. Our type system assigns types to embedded programs and what we call behaviors to processes; a denotational semantics of behaviors is then proposed, here called trace semantics, underlying much of the remaining analysis. We state and prove a Subject Reduction property for our polymorphically-typed calculus. Based on techniques borrowed from finite automata theory, type-checking of fully type-annotated processes is shown to be decidable. Our polymorphically-typed calculus is a conservative extension of the typed Ambient Calculus originally proposed by Cardelli and Gordon [CG99].

Klaim is a process language that permits programming distributed systems made up of several mobile components interacting through multiple distributed tuple spaces.

This paper presents the Kell calculus, a new distributed process calculus that retains the original insights of the Seal calculus (local actions, process replication) and of the M-calculus (higherorder processes and programmable membranes), although in a much simpler setting than the latter. The calculus is equipped with a type system that enforces a unicity property for location names that is crucial for the efficient implementation of the calculus. 1

The issue of this work is how to type mobility, in the sense that we tackle the problem of typing not only mobile agents but also their movement. This yields higher-order types for agents. To that end we first provide a new definition of the Seal Calculus that gets rid of existing inessential features while preserving the distinctive characteristics of the Seal model. Then we discuss the use of interfaces to type agents and define the type system. This type system induces a new interpretation of the types: interfaces describe interaction effects rather than, as it is customary, provided services. We discuss at length the difference of the two interpretations and justify our choice of the former.

Bigraphs have been introduced with the aim to provide a topographical meta-model for mobile, distributed agents that can manipulate their own linkages and nested locations, generalising both characteristics of the π-calculus and the Mobile Ambients calculus. We give the first bigraphical presentation of a non-linear, higher-order process calculus with nested locations, non-linear active process mobility, and local names, the calculus of Higher-Order Mobile Embedded Resources (Homer). The presentation is based on Milner’s recent presentation of the λ-calculus in local bigraphs. The combination of non-linear active process mobility and local names requires a new definition of parametric reaction rules and a representation of the location of names. We suggest localised bigraphs as a generalisation of local bigraphs in which links can be further localised. Key words: bigraphs, local names, non-linear process mobility

Nobuko Yoshida Imperial College London ABSTRACT We introduce a new expressive theory of types for the higher-order p-calculus and demonstrate its applicability via non-trivial security analyses of a simple class-based language with distributed code mobility. The new theory significantly improves our previous one presented in [52] by the use of channel dependent/existential types. New dependent types control dynamic change of process accessibility via channel passing, while existential types guarantee safe scope-extrusion in higher-order process passing. This solves an open issue in [52], leading to significant enlargement of original typability. Two basic security concerns for mobile computation, secrecy for data confidentiality and access controls for authorised resources are analysed in a uniform type-based static framework, culminating in the noninterference theorem and authority-error freedom in the presence of higher-order code mobility. The generality and expressiveness of the new type discipline are tested with a sound embedding of multi-threaded class-based language with dynamic code/class distribution, enforcing secrecy and accessibility.

This paper describes the design and the semantics of MetaKlaim, an higher order distributed process calculus equipped with staging mechanisms. MetaKlaim integrates MetaML (an extension of SML for multi-stage programming) and Klaim (a Kernel Language for Agents Interaction and Mobility), to permit interleaving of meta-programming activities (like assembly and linking of code fragments), dynamic checking of security policies at administrative boundaries and "traditional" computational activities on a wide area network (like remote communication and code mobility). MetaKlaim exploits a powerful type system (including polymorphic types a la system F) to deal with highly parameterized mobile components and to dynamically enforce security policies: types are metadata which are extracted from code at run-time and are used to express trustiness guarantees.

This paper introduces the Kell calculus, a new process calculus that retains the original insights of the M-calculus (local actions, higher-order processes and programmable membranes) in a much simpler setting. The calculus is shown expressive enough to provide a direct encoding of several recent distributed process calculi such as Mobile Ambients and the Distributed Join calculus.