Can functions be safely communicated across the network?

[Dale Schumacher]

Part of the Friam discussion today examined this issue. Some took the position that functions could not be safely communicated via serialization/deserialization. Others wondered where the risk was, and if it could be mitigated by making closed-over data immutable.

I mentioned Jonathan Rees paper "A Security Kernel Based on the Lambda-Calculus" as potentially relevant to the discussion, which I hope we will continue next week.

My apologies if I mischaracterized anyone's positions.

[Mike Stay]

On Fri, May 24, 2024 at 1:21 PM Dale Schumacher
<dale.sc...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Part of the Friam discussion today examined this issue. Some took the position that functions could not be safely communicated via serialization/deserialization. Others wondered where the risk was, and if it could be mitigated by making closed-over data immutable.

What do you mean by "safely"?

- That the data will reach the recipient without being snooped on or
modified? Seems like cryptography handles that.
- That the recipient will not be able to alter it? If the recipient
can only execute in the context of a runtime, then the runtime can
handle that; otherwise it seems impossible.
- That if the function closes over state, the state will not be shared
properly among all instances? Whether this is possible depends on the
guarantees you want about access to the state.
--
Mike Stay - meta...@gmail.com
https://math.ucr.edu/~mike
https://reperiendi.wordpress.com

[Tony Arcieri]

Erlang has something fun along these lines: both nodes must have the same code loaded, but if they do, you can send a “fun” (closure) over distributed Erlang, and the environment that has been closed over will be transmitted along with a reference to what code to call in the code server.

Tony Arcieri

On Fri, May 24, 2024 at 1:21 PM Dale Schumacher <dale.sc...@gmail.com> wrote:

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "friam" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to friam+un...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/friam/CAPeSZfDra101fJvrRo%2Bk1K0uwHwPsKLGUOBckq0t6uymfPsQ6w%40mail.gmail.com.

[Raoul Duke]

also, in what ways it different than the every day concern of, "can i safely import and use a library" especially if dynamically linked?