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Stephen Pair

Re: Mirror prims

On Wed, Dec 16, 2009 at 2:24 PM, Bert Freudenberg <[hidden email]> wrote:

On 16.12.2009, at 18:43, Eliot Miranda wrote:

In the bright rosy future concoct a convincing story around capabilities or mirrors which carefully modulate use of these facilities so they can't be misused.

That's exactly my point - I don't see how you could do a safe capability-based system with those primitives that can work around any encapsulation and hence can circumvent any capabilities.

- Bert -

Implementing a proper capability based system in squeak is likely to be an exercise in futility. However, in a system built from the ground up with a capability based security model, this is a non issue. Any code that should not have access to these primitives would not have access to them. In such a system, you would not be able to freely turn any method into a primitive as you can in squeak...you would need access to a compiler that had those capabilities...and, invocation of such primitives would require having a reference to some kernel object that implements those primitive method...which you would only offer to code that you trusted, or under circumstances where that level of security wasn't required (i.e. development or debugging).

- Stephen

David T. Lewis

Re: Re: Failing tests

In reply to this post by Levente Uzonyi-2

On Wed, Dec 16, 2009 at 11:02:20AM +0100, Levente Uzonyi wrote:

> On Tue, 15 Dec 2009, David T. Lewis wrote:
>
> >On Tue, Dec 15, 2009 at 08:35:55PM +0100, Levente Uzonyi wrote:
> >>
> >>We should definitely keep the tests. After a bit of googling I found
> >>Eliot's email which didn't get much attention:
> >>http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/vm-dev/2009-September/003161.html
> >>This explains everything about mirror primitives. I wonder why these
> >>changes aren't integrated into VMMaker. (Note that ContextPart >>
> >>#objectClass: is missing from the attached source, I added an
> >>implementation to the trunk). I marked the failing tests as expected
> >>failures.
> >>
> >
> >Thanks for the pointer. I somehow completely overlooked this posting
> >on the vm-dev list. I opened a Mantis issue for "Add Mirror Primitives
> >to the VM" to track it.
> >
> > http://bugs.squeak.org/view.php?id=7429
>
> Great, thanks. I would be cool if these changes could get into the next vm
> release IMO.

The changes are not ready for inclusion yet, but hopefully soon.