Towards a resource-safe Erlang

Abstract

Slowly but surely, industry is discovering the need for programming languages, runtime environments and methodologies adapted to collaborative and distributed computing platforms. However, current distributed platforms, whether industrial or academic, are generally fragile with respect to resource exhaustion, and can provide, at best, ad hoc solutions to counter accidents or denial of service attacks. In this paper, we examine the problem of resource management in Erlang, that is providing services for distant use, while ensuring that untrusted third-parties using the services may not cause the exhaustion of memory, file handles or other limited resources. For this, we use targettable/extendable pi-calculus specification language and provide a formal semantics for a subset of core Erlang, as well as a model of some of its library. From these models, we derive a type system for formally guaranteeing robustness of services with respect to denial of service attacks.