Distributed applications can be structured as parties that exchange messages according to some pre-arranged communication patterns. These sessions (or contracts, or protocols) simplify distributed programming: when coding a role for a given session, each party just has to follow the intended message flow, under the assumption that the other parties are also compliant. In an adversarial setting, remote parties may not be trusted to play their role. Hence, defensive implementations also have to monitor one another, in order to detect any deviation from the assigned roles of a session. This task involves low-level coding below session abstractions, thus giving up most of their benefits. We explore language-based support for sessions. We extend the ML language with session types that express flows of messages between roles, such that well-typed programs always play their roles. We compile session type declarations to cryptographic communication protocols that can shield programs from any low-level attempt by coalitions of remote peers to deviate from their roles. Our main result is that, when reasoning about programs that use our session implementation, one can safely assume that all session peers comply with their roles—without trusting their remote implementations. 1 Session types for distributed programming Programming networked, independent systems is complex, because the programmer has little control over the runtime environment. To simplify his task, programming languages and system libraries offer abstractions for common communication patterns (such as private channels or RPCs), with automated support to help the programmer use these abstractions reliably and to relieve him from their lowlevel implementation details (such as message format and routing). As an example, web services promote declarative types and policies for messaging, with tools that can automatically fetch these declarations and set up proxies with a simple typed programming interface.

Existing ML-like languages guarantee type-safety, ensuring memory safety and protecting the invariants of abstract types, but only within single executions of single programs. Distributed programming is becoming ever more important, and should benefit even more from such guarantees. In previous work on theoretical calculi and the Acute prototype language we outlined techniques to provide them for simple languages. In this

Distributed applications can be structured as parties that exchange messages according to some pre-arranged communication patterns. These sessions (or contracts, or protocols) simplify distributed programming: when coding a role for a given session, each party just has to follow the intended message flow, under the assumption that the other parties are also compliant. In an adversarial setting, remote parties may not be trusted to play their role. Hence, defensive implementations also have to monitor one another, in order to detect any deviation from the assigned roles of a session. This task involves lowlevel coding below session abstractions, thus giving up most of their benefits. We explore language-based support for sessions. We extend the ML language with session types that express flows of messages between roles, such that welltyped programs always play their roles. We compile session type declarations to cryptographic communication protocols that can shield programs from any lowlevel attempt by coalitions of remote peers to deviate from their roles. Our main result is that, when reasoning about programs that use our session implementation,

The subtyping test consists of checking whether a type t is a descendant of a type r (Agrawal et al. 1989). We study how to perform such a test efficiently, assuming a dynamic hierarchy when new types are inserted at run-time. The goal is to achieve time and space efficiency, even as new types are inserted. We propose an extensible scheme, named ESE, that ensures (1) efficient insertion of new types, (2) efficient subtyping tests, and (3) small space usage. On the one hand ESE provides comparable test times to the most efficient existing static schemes (e.g., Zibin et al. (2001)). On the other hand, ESE has comparable insertion times to the most efficient existing dynamic scheme (Baehni et al. 2007), while ESE outperforms it by a factor of 2-3 times in terms of space usage.

Mobile computation, in which executing computations can move from one physical computing device to another, is a recurring theme: from OS process migration, to language-level mobility, to virtual machine migration. This paper reports on the design, implementation, and verification of overlay networks to support reliable communication between migrating computations, in the Nomadic Pict project. We define two levels of abstraction as calculi with precise semantics: a low-level Nomadic π-calculus with migration and location-dependent communication, and a high-level calculus that adds location-independent communication. Implementations of locationindependent communication, as overlay networks that track migrations and forward messages, can be expressed as translations of the high-level calculus into the low. We discuss the design space of such overlay network algorithms and define three precisely, as such translations. Based on the calculi, we design and implement the Nomadic Pict distributed programming language, to let such algorithms (and simple applications above them) to be quickly prototyped. We go on to develop the semantic theory of the Nomadic π-calculi, proving correctness of one example overlay network. This requires novel equivalences and congruence results that take migration into account, and reasoning principles for agents that are temporarily immobile (e.g. waiting on a lock

d' ctivity eport 2006 Table of contents