Abstract
Developing distributed applications typically requires to integrate new code with legacy third-party services, e.g., e-commerce facilities, maps, etc. These services cannot always be assumed to smoothly collaborate with each other; rather, they live in a “wild” environment where they must compete for resources, and possibly diverge from the expected behaviour if they find it convenient to do so. To overcome these issues, some recent works have proposed to discipline the interaction of mutually distrusting services through behavioural contracts. The idea is a dynamic composition, where only those services with compliant contracts can establish sessions through which they interact. Compliance between contracts guarantees that, if services behave honestly, they will enjoy safe interactions. We exploit a theory of timed behavioural contracts to formalise, design and implement a message-oriented middleware where distributed services can be dynamically composed, and their interaction monitored to detect contract violations. We show that the middleware allows to reduce the complexity of developing distributed applications, by relieving programmers from the need to explicitly deal with the misbehaviour of external services.
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Notes
- 1.
We denote with \(\mathbf {u}\) a sequence of names/variables, and we assume each
to have a unique definition
, with the free vars of
included in
.
- 2.
To avoid confusion between “channel-kinded” variables used in input/output prefixes and “session-kinded” variables, we forbid processes which improperly mix them, like e.g.
, where y is used both as a session variable and a channel variable.
- 3.
Asynchronous communication is possible despite TSTs having a synchronous semantics, as the middleware is delegated to receive messages on behalf of the recipient.
- 4.
Note that verifying the correctness of private keys has a polynomial complexity in the number of bits of the public key, while the problem of cracking RSA keys is considered to be exponentially hard.
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Acknowledgments
The authors thank Maria Grazia Patteri, Mirko Joshua Mascia and Stefano Lande for their assistance in setting up the evalution and the case studies, and Alceste Scalas for the discussion about Java APIs. This work is partially supported by Aut. Reg. of Sardinia grants L.R.7/2007 CRP-17285 (TRICS), P.I.A. 2010 (“Social Glue”), P.O.R. F.S.E. Operational Programme of the Aut. Reg. of Sardinia, EU Social Fund 2007-13 – Axis IV Human Resources, Objective l.3, Line of Activity l.3.1), by MIUR PRIN 2010-11 project “Security Horizons”, and by EU COST Action IC1201 “Behavioural Types for Reliable Large-Scale Software Systems” (BETTY).
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Bartoletti, M., Cimoli, T., Murgia, M., Podda, A.S., Pompianu, L. (2016). A Contract-Oriented Middleware. In: Braga, C., Ölveczky, P. (eds) Formal Aspects of Component Software. FACS 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9539. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28934-2_5
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