Living in the comfort zone

13 years 10 months ago

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A comfort zone is a tested region of a system’s input space within which it has been observed to behave acceptably. To keep systems operating within their comfort zones, we advocate the interposition of rectiﬁers between systems and their input sources. Rectiﬁers are designed to transform inputs to ensure that they are within the comfort zone before they are presented to the system. Rectiﬁers enforce a highly constrained input format and, if necessary, discard information to force inputs to conform to this format. Potential beneﬁts of this approach include the elimination of errors and vulnerabilities, the excision of undesirable excess functionality from large, complex systems, and a simpliﬁcation of the computing environment. We have developed a rectiﬁer for email messages and used this rectiﬁer to force messages into a speciﬁc constrained form. Our results show that this rectiﬁer can successfully produce messages that keep the Pine email client strictly within c...

Martin C. Rinard

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