A Practical Mobile-Code Format with Linear Verification Effort

We present an abstract machine that encodes both type safety and control safety in an efficient manner and that is suitable as a mobile-code format. At the code consumer, a single linear-complexity algorithm performs not only verification, but simultaneously also transforms the stack-based wire format into a register-based internal format. The latter is beneficial for interpretation and native code generation. Our dual-representation approach overcomes some of the disadvantages of existing mobile-code representations, such as the JVM and CLR wire formats.