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New Paper: Safe and Flexible Dynamic Linking of Native Code
We are pleased to announce our research report "Safe and Flexible Dynamic
Linking of Native Code." The details are below. Comments are most welcome.
Postscript: http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~mwh/taldynlink.ps.gz
PDF: http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~mwh/taldynlink.pdf
Mike
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Safe and Flexible Dynamic Linking of Native Code
Karl Crary, Michael Hicks and Stephanie Weirich
Abstract:
We present the design and implementation of a framework for flexible and
safe dynamic linking of native code. Our approach extends Typed Assembly
Language with a primitive for loading and typechecking code, which is
flexible enough to support a variety of linking strategies, but simple
enough that it does not significantly expand the trusted computing
base. Using this primitive, along with the ability to compute with types, we
show that we can program many existing dynamic linking approaches. As a
concrete demonstration, we have used our framework to implement dynamic
linking for a type-safe dialect of C, closely modeled after the standard
linking facility for Unix C programs. Aside from the unavoidable cost of
verification, our implementation performs comparably with the standard,
untyped approach.
Available as Penn Technical report MS-CIS-00-13.
--
Michael Hicks
Ph.D. Candidate, the University of Pennsylvania
http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~mwh mailto://mwh@dsl.cis.upenn.edu
"In essential things, unity; in doubtful things, liberty; in all things,
charity."