Position Paper
Nominal Calculi for Security and Mobility
Andrew D. Gordon
Needham defines a pure name to be ``nothing but a bit pattern that is an
identifier, and is only useful for comparing for identity with other bit
patterns---which includes looking up in tables in order to find other
information''. In this paper, we argue that pure names are relevant to both
security and mobility. Nominal calculi are computational formalisms that
include pure names and the dynamic generation of fresh, unguessable names. We
survey recent work on nominal calculi with primitives representing location
failure, process migration and cryptography, and suggest areas for further
work.
This is a position paper prepared for the DARPA Workshop
on Foundations for Secure Mobile Code, March 26-28 1997.
It is available as HTML
or US Letter PostScript.
Andrew D. Gordon
(adg@cl.cam.ac.uk),
University of Cambridge, Computer Laboratory.