MarkM's dissertation. Explains the rationale, philosophy, and goals of E and related systems.
Supersedes Paradigm Regained, Concurrency Among Strangers, and The Structure of Authority.
SCOLL:
A Language for Safe Capability Based Collaboration
by Yves Jaradin, Fred Spiessens, & Peter van Roy
Provides a formal system for reasoning about safe bounds on authority (as defined in Robust Composition).
Concurrency
Among Strangers:
Programming in E as
Plan Coordination
by Mark S. Miller, E. Dean Tribble, Jonathan Shapiro
Explains E's concurrency control & distributed computing model.
by Ben Laurie
Explains "CaPerl", Ben's attempt at a capability-safe variant of Perl.
YURL.net launches
Tyler Close and Sue Butler brings the y property (the lambda/object-capability theory of naming) to the web.
E will be switching from VatTP and cap:// URIs to the httpsy protocol and httpsy:// URLs. (Separately, CapTP will be switching from Java serialization to Data-E.)
Marc Stiegler explains what it means to apply the Principle
of Least Authority (POLA) consistently, at both the programming
level (using capabilities) and user-interface level (demonstrating
CapDesk).
Includes both slides
and video.
Institutions as Abstraction
Boundaries:
Negotiated Categories and the Self-Reorganization of the Market
Order
Economies and object systems both compose knowledge by coordinating the plans of mutually suspicious parties, by using abstraction in similar ways. Bill Tulloh and Mark Miller apply object concepts to understand the role of abstraction in economic activity.
The home page of the Squeak-E project; building a capability secure distributed Smalltalk.
gives a brief history of how capabilities have been misunderstood, and sets the record straight.
Read Usenix2003's rejection of our paper, including Boebert's take on his "On the Inability of an Unmodified Capability System to Enforce the *-Property ", which we cite.
We wish to emphasize that the web browser
exercise was a very difficult problem. It is at or beyond the
state of the art in security, and solving it seems to require
invention of new technology. If anything, the exercise seems to
have been designed to answer the question: Where are the borders
of what is achievable? The E capability architecture seems to
be a promising way to stretch those borders beyond what was previously
achievable, by making it easier to build security boundaries
between mutually distrusting software components. In this
sense, the experiment seems to be a real success. Many open questions
remain, but we feel that the E capability architecture is a promising
direction in computer security research and we hope it receives
further attention.
[emphasis added]
At the coming O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference:
MarcS shows CapDesk, and explains how E, capabilities, caplets, and POLA (the Principle Of Least Authority) bring about an intuitive secure desktop invulnerable to viruses.0.8.10alpha1: A brave new CapTP (our cryptographic capability protocol).
This is the first release of E to be distributed (with full pipelining support, but no 3vat introductions yet), persistent (sort-of), and to support and confine locally untrusted code. The is the new current E distribution.Miriam Walker & Ka-Ping Yee break important new ground: A secure graphical user interface for interacting with a general purpose secure platform.
Even more important: their seven principles of secure UI design!
Marc Stiegler posts his draft book The E Language in a Walnut.
Announcing The ENative Project. How fast can a simple implementation of E be?
"Contracting-out
Contract Law" (Powerpoint)
To be presented at Lex
Cybernetoria 2
Smart contracts present new hope for the third world.
Here are some recently posted explanations.
The Three Parts of Security is a great short statement by Bill Frantz of the problems a security architecture needs to solve.
Lambda for Humans: The PetName Markup Language explains a user-interface for enabling humans to securely interact with a world of capabilities, and to use capabilities to securely interact with other humans.
Unibus Sketch sketches a single-key variant of Pluribus, to demonstrate the independence of cryptographic capabilities from the particular choice of cryptographic substrate.
In a crit-mail thread, Ralph Hartley establishes a surprising case where capabilities do fall short of theoretically possible security, summarized in Where Capabilities Do Fall Short.
Quasi-Literals and XML proposes a way to leverage E's Quasi-Parser Framework to enable XML transformations to be written more clearly and easily.
DropletsTM was conceived with the aim of creating an E like capability environment based on the current WWW infrastructure and client browsers. In this environment, programmers can reason about the security of their web application in the same way that they reason about the security of an E application. The Waterken DropletsTM software supports the ERTP, allowing programmers to deploy Java smart contracts much like those written in E.
Marc Stiegler's latest science fiction novel, Earthweb, is now available. Its opening scene is an accurate portrayal of a capability-based erights exchange, inspired directly by our plans to do likewise in E. The future of Earthweb is built on the future of bidirectional hypertext, E-style cryptographic-capability-based emarkets, and Robin Hanson's Idea Futures Markets.
Marc Stiegler (again) writes and open-sources Secureit-Echat, a strongly-secure two-person chat program, written in five pages of E. Around three of those pages are user interface. This easy-to-read program is a good example of how to construct distributed secure applications in E.
Check out the still-rough, but much better, E-Language Tutorial .