Wyvern - Security by Design

Alex Potanin, Victoria University of Wellington
Jonathan Aldrich, Carnegie Mellon University

The engineering properties of programs derive from their design. As
programs grow in scale and complexity, ensuring compliance with the
overall design intent becomes more critical yet also more difficult. The
goal of the Wyvern programming language is to help programmers cleanly
express and enforce design as an integral part of programming. Wyvern
accomplishes this with a capability-safe object model that expresses
design constraints constructively, a strong system of types and effects
to enforce abstractions at both component and object scales, and an
extensible syntax that can express designs in a variety of domains while
preserving important security and modularity properties. Our talk will
flesh out these design goals and demonstrate how the features of the
language support them, while highlighting some research directions that
have arisen from the language's goals.