In traditional information-flow type systems, the security policy is often formalized as noninterference properties. However, noninterference alone is too strong to express security properties useful in practice. If we allow downgrading in such systems, it is challenging to formalize the security policy as an extensional property of the system. This paper presents a generalized framework of downgrading policies. Such policies can be specified in a simple and tractable language and can be statically enforced by mechanisms such as type systems. The security guarantee is then formalized as a concise extensional property using program equivalences. This relaxed noninterference generalizes traditional pure noninterference and precisely characterizes the information released due to downgrading.

This paper proposes to combine two seemingly opposed programming models for building massively concurrent network services: the event-driven model and the multithreaded model. The result is a hybrid design that offers the best of both worlds-the ease of use and expressiveness of threads and the flexibility and performance of events. This paper shows how the hybrid model can be implemented entirely at the application level using concurrency monads in Haskell, which provides type-safe abstractions for both events and threads. This approach simplifies the development of massively concurrent software in a way that scales to real-world network services. The Haskell implementation supports exceptions, symmetrical multiprocessing, software transactional memory, asynchronous I/O mechanisms and application-level network protocol stacks. Experimental results demonstrate that this monad-based approach has good performance: the threads are extremely lightweight (scaling to ten million threads), and the I/O performance compares favorably to that of Linux NPTL. Comments AbstractThis paper proposes to combine two seemingly opposed programming models for building massively concurrent network services: the event-driven model and the multithreaded model. The result is a hybrid design that offers the best of both worlds-the ease of use and expressiveness of threads and the flexibility and performance of events.This paper shows how the hybrid model can be implemented entirely at the application level using concurrency monads in Haskell, which provides type-safe abstractions for both events and threads. This approach simplifies the development of massively concurrent software in a way that scales to real-world network services. The Haskell implementation supports exceptions, symmetrical multiprocessing, software transactional memory, asynchronous I/O mechanisms and application-level network protocol stacks. Experimental results demonstrate that this monad-based approach has good performance: the threads are extremely lightweight (scaling to ten million threads), and the I/O performance compares favorably to that of Linux NPTL. * This is a preprint of a paper that appeared in the 2007 ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Languages Design and Implementation 1. We scaled up the design of the concurrency monad to a real-world implementation, providing elegant and flexible interfaces for building massively concurrent network services using efficient asynchronous I/O.2. We proved that the monad-based design has good performance: it delivers optimal I/O performance; it has efficient memory utilization and it scales as well as event-driven systems.3. We demonstrated the feasibility of the hybrid programming model in high-performance network servers, providing future directions for both systems and programming language research.Our experience also suggests that Haskell is a reasonable language for building scalable systems software: it is expressive, succinct, efficient and type-safe; it interacts well with C libraries and APIs. The hybrid p...

Java Card technology simplifies the development of smart card applications by providing a high-level programming language similar to Java. However, the master-slave programming model used in current Java Card platform creates control flow difficulties when writing complex card programs, making it inconvenient, tedious, and error-prone to implement Java Card applications. This paper examines these drawbacks of the master-slave model and proposes a concurrent thread model for developing future Java Card programs, which is much closer to conventional Java network programming. This paper also presents a code translation algorithm and a corresponding tool that makes it possible to write card programs in the concurrent thread model without losing compatibility with the existing Java Card API.