(I am reposting this with updated links) The RMoD team at INRIA Lille / France is offering a PhD position. "Reflection and Security in Dynamic Languages". Applications must be submitted online, the deadline is *Mai 4*. More information and online application: http://bit.ly/cbAlE9 More on doing a PhD at INRIA: http://www.inria.fr/travailler/opportunites/doc.en.html ====================================================================== Reflection and Security in Dynamic Languages ============================================ Position type: PhD Student Functional area: Lille (Villeneuve d'Asq) Project: RMOD Environnement ============= To support the creation and evolution of complex systems, dynamic languages provide support for reflection. A reflective system contains a model of itself to enable runtime change: if we change the model, the system changes and vice versa. Reflection allows the programmer to do any kind of change at runtime, even those that render the system useless or breach any kind of security guarantees. Reflection is an established research theme and has seen a lot of work over the last decades. The question of how to control reflection and related that of secure reflective systems in general has not seen much research activity. The PhD Student therefore will work on the question on how to control reflection and work towards enabling systems that are both reflective and secure. Missions ======== The goal of this PhD is to propose a new secure reflective language kernel for dynamic languages. The following points should be explored: - Study existing models of security. - Study existing reflective systems and especially prior work on security and reflection. - Propose a new, secure model of reflection. - Implemented the model in a dynamic, object-oriented language. Compétences et Profil ===================== - Reflective programming - Smalltalk / C - English Informations complémentaires ============================ Chercheur(s) à contacter pour plus dâinformation/advisors : Stéphane Ducasse : stephane.ducasse@inria.fr Marcus Denker : marcus.denker@inria.fr References ========== [1] Marcus Denker, Tudor Gîrba, Adrian Lienhard, Oscar Nierstrasz, Lukas Renggli and Pascal Zumkehr, âEncapsulating and Exploiting Change with Changeboxes,â Proceedings of the 2007 International Conference on Dynamic Languages (ICDL 2007), ACM Digital Library, 2007, pp. 25--49. [2] Oscar Nierstrasz, Alexandre Bergel, Marcus Denker, Stéphane Ducasse, Markus Gaelli and Roel Wuyts, âOn the Revival of Dynamic Languages,â Proceedings of Software Composition 2005, Thomas Gschwind and Uwe AÃmann (Eds.), vol. 3628, LNCS 3628, 2005, pp. 1-13 [3] Mark S. Miller and Jonathan S. Shapiro. Paradigm Regained: Abstraction Mechanisms for Access Control. In Proceedings of the Eigth Asian Computing Science Conference, p. 224-242, 2003. [4] Mark Samuel Miller. Robust Composition: Towards a Unified Approach to Access Control and Concurrency Control. Ph.D. thesis, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, USA, May 2006. -- Marcus Denker -- http://www.marcusdenker.de INRIA Lille -- Nord Europe. Team RMoD.