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Asian Symposium on Programming Languages and Systems

APLAS 2009: Programming Languages and Systems pp 144–160Cite as

Ownership Downgrading for Ownership Types

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 5904))

Abstract

Ownership types support information hiding by providing object-based encapsulation. However the static restrictions they impose on object accessibility can limit the expressiveness of ownership types. In order to deal with real applications, it is sometimes necessary to admit mechanisms for dynamically exposing otherwise encapsulated information. The need for policies and mechanisms to control such information flow, known as downgrading or declassification, has been well covered in the security literature.

This paper proposes a flexible ownership type system for object-level access control. It still maintains privacy of owned data, but allows information to be dynamically exposed where appropriate through an explicit declassification operation. The key innovation is an owners-as-downgraders policy, implemented via a simple language construct, which allows an object to be made more widely accessible by downgrading its ownership to its owner’s owner.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Programming Languages and Compilers Group School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of New South Wales, Sydney

    Yi Lu, John Potter & Jingling Xue

Authors
  1. Yi Lu
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  2. John Potter
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  3. Jingling Xue
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. National Institute of Informatics (NII), Information Systems Architecture REsearch Division, 2-1-2 Hitotsubashi, Chiyoda-ku, 101-8430, Tokyo, Japan

    Zhenjiang Hu

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© 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Lu, Y., Potter, J., Xue, J. (2009). Ownership Downgrading for Ownership Types. In: Hu, Z. (eds) Programming Languages and Systems. APLAS 2009. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5904. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-10672-9_12

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-10672-9_12

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-10671-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-10672-9

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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