Go Runtime Enforcement Techniques

A strong persisting trend in computer and software systems is the all-presence of distributed and concurrent systems, as witnessed by the rise of cloud computing and multicore architectures. These developments pose serious challenges for the evolution of new programming languages and accompanying analysis methods. As a matter of fact, many languages of widespread present-day concurrency have been designed at the core for traditional architectures and the corresponding sequential programming paradigm, with concurrency and parallelism as mere afterthoughts. The objective of this project is to develop and apply robust and novel analysis techniques for the highly-concurrent programming language Go, focusing on security-related applications. Targeting doma ins like cloud computing and efficient support of recent multicore architectures, Go is designed around clean, elegant, and well-understood concurrency primitives, in particular supporting various forms of channel communication and other concurrency abstr actions, not offered by libraries, but at the core of the language. Drawing upon experience of years of concurrency research, but without neglecting practical aspects (e.g., garbage collection, efficient execution, a clean type system, guaranteeing type s afety etc.), the open-source language quickly gained momentum, partly due to the backing of an industrial giant like Google, and partly due to the rising importance of the targeted application domains. As a result, Go has been nominated ``Language of the year'' 2009 in the well-known TIOBE index. Taking recent advances and contributions from both collaborating partners as starting point, the project will develop mathematically sound analysis techniques to help enforcing safety- and security-related prope rties in distributed Go programs. The techniques will include techniques, based on advanced constraint-based type systems, and run-time techniques, monitoring running systems as safeguard against policy-violations.