DOAS: an object oriented architecture supporting secure languages

Abstract

Current software engineering practice heavily relies on the reliability of software implementation languages and underlying architectures. However, both the currently used languages, as well as the traditional architectures suffer from a shortage of built-in security. In this paper, an architecture is presented, which is heavily influenced by two properties of secure languages: coercion and exception handling. It is shown that proper design decisions lead to an architecture having a compact data representation, allowing both generic and nongeneric instructions. The architecture is object oriented, and object addressing is under control of the operand stream, with optimalisation possibilities to bypass descriptor inspection.