This seminar course will focus on code mobility and programming languages techniques for building secure systems in the presence of mobile code.
Mobile code is omnipresent on the Internet.
Technologies such as Java and Active X support a software distribution model in which application code is downloaded on the fly. Mobile agents and active network push the paradigm one step further by allowing running programs to control where they execute. Mobility increases the flexibilty and adaptability of distributed systems, but the price is increased security concerns. The risks stem from the fact that untrusted, or partially trusted, code is allowed to execute on the user machine and interact with programs running at different trust levels. It is essential to come up with security measures that will ensure that mobile code will not obtain or modify sensitive information nor deny other applications the use of some resource.