Project TRANSPROSE: reconciling mobile-code security with execution efficiency

Project TRANSPROSE is a comprehensive research project investigating techniques for transporting programs securely over potentially insecure channels. The central focus of this project is the development of a blueprint for a next-generation mobile code distribution format. A problem of previous approaches to mobile code security has been that the additional provisions for security lead to a loss of efficiency, often to the extent of making an otherwise virtuous security scheme unusable for all but trivial programs. TRANSPROSE strives to deviate from the common approach of studying security in isolation and instead focuses simultaneously on multiple aspects of mobile code quality. Besides security, such aspects include encoding density, speed of dynamic code generation and the eventual execution performance. This paper gives a high-level overview of Project TRANSPROSE and presents initial results, which include a highly effective syntax-based compression scheme for Java programs, as well as a performance-oriented intermediate program representation providing guaranteed security.