Section: New Results

Static guarantees for message-passing computation

Participant : Stéphane Graham-Lengrand.

LCF  [79] is a proof-search architecture, where search strategies are programmed via an API and successful proof-search runs are guaranteed correct, relying on the use of an abstract type theorem . We adapted the approach and defined principles for message-passing software architectures (where modules interact by exchanging messages), with the objective of guaranteeing message provenance and integrity. The principles rely on abstract types to sign messages at no run-time cost, and more generally rely on type-checking to provide static guarantees (i.e. at compile-time) that the messages produced by a trusted piece of code will not be altered or faked by an untrusted piece of code. We developed this primarily for safe theorem proving architectures, but the approach can be applied to other software architectures where modules with different levels of trust interact.