The security system depends on limited knowledge of internal names

(written by lawrence krubner, however indented passages are often quotes). You can contact lawrence at: lawrence@krubner.com, or follow me on Twitter.

Interesting:

We require that the names of processes are unforgeable. This means that it should be impossible to guess the name of a process, and thereby interact with that process. We will assume that processes know their own names, and that processes which create other processes know the names of the processes which they have created. In other words, a parent process knows the names of its children.

In order to write COPLs we will need mechanisms for finding out the names of the processes involved. Remember, if we know the name of a process, we can send a message to that process.

System security is intimately connected with the idea of knowing the name of a process. If we do not know the name of a process we cannot interact with it in any way, thus the system is secure. Once the names of processes become widely know the system becomes less secure. We call the process of revealing names to other processes in a controlled manner
the name distribution problem the key to security lies in the name distribution problem. When we reveal a Pid to another process we will say that we have published the name of the process. If a name is never published
there are no security problems.

Thus knowing the name of a process is the key element of security.

Since names are unforgeable the system is secure only if we can limit the knowledge of the names of the processes to trusted processes.

In many primitive religions it was believed that humans had powers over spirits if they could command them by their real names. Knowing the real name of a spirit gave you power over the spirit, and using this name you could command the spirit to do various things for you. COPLs use the same idea.

Post external references

  1. 1
    http://www.erlang.org/download/armstrong_thesis_2003.pdf
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