A Tail-Recursive Semantics for Stack Inspections

13 years 10 months ago

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Security folklore holds that a security mechanism based on stack inspection is incompatible with a global tail call optimization policy. An implementation of such a language may have to allocate memory for a source-code tail call, and a program that uses only tail calls (and no other memory-allocating construct) may nevertheless exhaust the available memory. In this paper, we prove this widely held belief wrong. We an abstract machine for a language with security stack inspection whose space consumption function is equivalent to that of the canonical l optimizing abstract machine. Our machine is surprisingly simple and suggests that tail-calls are as easy to implement in a security setting as they are in a conventional one. 1 Stacks, Security, and Tail Calls Over the last ten years, programming language implementors have spent signiﬁcant eﬀort on security issues. This eﬀort takes many forms; one is the implementation of a strategy known as stack inspection [17]. It starts from th...

John Clements, Matthias Felleisen

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