Rationally Reconstructing the Escrow Example

The Escrow Exchange Contract has been used as a case study of building up complex and trustworthy systems from basic object capabilities, in the context of concurrent and distributed programming. In this short paper we present a Rational Reconstruction of the Escrow Exchange Contract case study, expressed in Grace, concentrating on the most essential issues of trustworthiness, and ignoring issues to do with distribution or more complex protocols. We then use our notation for capability policies to specify the key features of the reconstructed case study.