Wrap Your Objects Safely

Despite the effort of researchers on distributed systems, programming languages, and security, there is still no good solution offering basic constructs for guaranteeing minimal security at the programming language level. In particular, the notion of a wrapper around an object or component controlling its interaction with the environment has not properly been addressed. This kind of “local firewall” may play two different roles: (1) The untrusted part is what is inside the wrapper; (2) The untrusted part is the environment. In this paper we propose the addition of a language primitive for creating wrapped objects and components, and sketch a formalization based on a minimal object-oriented language for distributed systems using asynchronous communication.