Coordinating processes with secure spaces

The Linda shared space model and its derivatives provide great flexibility for building parallel and distributed applications composed of independent processes. However, the shared space model does not provide protection against untrustworthy processes. Linda processes communicate by reading and writing messages in a globally visible data space, so a malicious process can launch any number of security attacks. This paper presents the design of a new coordination model which extends Linda with fine-grained access control. The semantics of the model is presented in the context of a process calculus. A prototype of our model, called SECOS, has been implemented in JAVA.