Frontiers of Computer Science

, Volume 7, Issue 2, pp 236–256 | Cite as

Confinement framework for encapsulating objects

Research Article
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Abstract

Confinement is used to prohibit safety-critical objects from unintended access. Approaches for specifying and verifying confinement have been proposed in the last twenty years but their application has been help back. We develop a novel framework for specifying and verifying object confinement in object-oriented (OO) programs. Instead of expressing the confinement requirements within a class for possible future usage, as with ownership types, we specify confinement requirements of the class in its usage class which actually intends to confine the parts, i.e., internal representations. Syntactically, an optional conf clause is introduced in class declarations for annotating the confined attribute-paths. A “same type and confinement” notation is introduced for expressing type and confinement dependence among variables, parameters, and return values of methods. Based on the extension to a Java-like language and existing techniques of alias analysis, we define a sound type-system for checking the well-confinedness of OO programs with respect to the confinement specifications.

Keywords

object-oriented aliasing confinement ownership type system well-confined program 
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Copyright information

© Higher Education Press and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.LMAM and Department of Informatics, School of Mathematical SciencesPeking UniversityBeijingChina
  2. 2.State Key Laboratory of Computer Science, Institute of SoftwareChinese Academy of SciencesBeijingChina

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