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.