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...e like) to keep unauthorized users out, while detailed access control lists regulate use by authorized users. Governance regimes have proved successful in managing shared resources in many situations =-=[17]-=-. However, they tend to break down under increasing complexity. As the number of users and types of use increases, the ability of governance systems to limit external access and manage internal use br...

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...press distributed interactions between individual objects. Promises We introduce a new type of object, a promise, to represent both the outcome of asynchronous operations as well as remote references =-=[12]-=-. A normal JavaScript direct reference may only designate an object within the same event loop. Only promises designate objects in other event loops. A promise may be in one of several states: pending...

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...n identifiable individuals or firms at every instant of time. The books are kept up to date despite the burden imposed by dynamic forces, such as births and deaths, dissolutions, and new technology.” =-=[14]-=- Rights help people coordinate plans and resolve conflicts over use of resources. Rights partition the space of actions to avoid interference between separately formulated plans, thus enabling coopera...

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... the object it designates. A message sent on a reference both exercises this right and grants to the receiving object the right to invoke the passed arguments. In an object-capability (ocap) language =-=[7]-=-, an object can cause effects on the world outside itself only by using the references it holds. Some objects are transitively immutable or powerless [8], while others might cause effects. An object m...

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... communicating event loops. Communicating event loop concurrency makes it manageable for objects to maintain their invariants in the face of concurrent (interleaved) requests made by multiple clients =-=[11]-=-. While JavaScript environments already support event loop concurrency, the JavaScript language itself has no support for concurrent or distributed programming. Q thus extends JavaScript with a handfu...

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...ctronic rights (erights) or smart contracts per se. Its focus is to make distributed secure programming in JavaScript as effortless as possible. But much of the design of Dr. SES and its predecessors =-=[2,3,4]-=- was shaped by examining what we need to express smart contracts simply. Taking a rights-based approach to local and distributed computing, we believe, has led us to building a better general purpose ...

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...d tort brings resources into a system of rights. Property law determines the initial acquisition of rights; contract law governs the transfer of rights; and tort law protects rights from interference =-=[21]-=-. Ocap systems follow a similar logic: the rules of object creation make it easy to create objects with only the rights they need, the message passing rules govern the transfer of rights, and encapsul...

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...e and the remote unguessable reference represent one kind of eright—the right to invoke the public interface of the object it designates. In ocap systems, references bundle authority with designation =-=[19]-=-. Like property rights, they are possessory rights: possession of the reference is all that is required for its use, its use is at the discretion of the possessing entity, and the entity holding the r...

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...vice to its well behaved clients, despite arbitrary or malicious misbehavior by its other clients. SES has a formal semantics supporting automated verification of some security properties of SES code =-=[9]-=-. The code in this paper uses the following functions from the SES library: def(obj) def ines a def ensible object. To support defensive consistency, the def function makes the properties of its argum...

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...turns allegedNumber. Otherwise it throws an error. var m = WeakMap() assigns to m a new empty weak map. WeakMaps are an ES6 extension (emulated by SES on ES5 browsers) supporting rights amplification =-=[10]-=-. Ignoring space usage, m is simply an object-identity-keyed table.m.set(obj,val) associates obj’s identity as key with val as value, so m.get(obj) returns val and m.delete(obj) removes this entry. T...

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..., has no direct use value; its value is symbolic. It has value only in exchange. Contracts manipulate rights. The participants in a contract each bring to it those rights the contract will manipulate =-=[23]-=-. The logic of the contract together with the decisions of the participants determines which derived rights they each walk away with. The simplest example is a direct trade. Since half the rights exch...

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...ized into a remote reference for sending messages back to this object itself. Over the RESTful transport [5], we serialize pass-by-reference objects using unguessable HTTPS URLs (also called web-keys =-=[13]-=-). Such a reference may look like https://www.example.com/app/#mhbqcmmva5ja3, where the fragment (everything after the #) is a random character string that uniquely identifies an object on the example...

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...llenges designers face in building computational systems. Historically, two broad strategies for avoiding the tragedy of the commons have emerged: a governance strategy and a property rights strategy =-=[16]-=-. The governance approach solves the open access problem by restricting access to members and regulating each member’s use of the shared resource. The property rights approach divides ownership of the...

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...interpreted, and adjudicated only by expensive experts. Smart contracts are contract-like arrangements expressed in program code, where the behavior of the program enforces the terms of the “contract”=-=[1]-=-. Though not a substitute for legal contracts, they can provide some of the benefits of contracts for fine-grain, jurisdiction-free, and automated arrangements for which legal contracts are impractica...

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...ES programs can survive failures without effort on the part of the programmer. Dr. SES builds on the NodeKen project, which is layering the Node.js server-side JavaScript platform onto the Ken system =-=[6]-=- for distributed orthogonal persistence—resilient against many failures. 2.1 Just Enough JavaScript JavaScript is a complex language, but this paper depends only on a small subset with two core constr...

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...ctronic rights (erights) or smart contracts per se. Its focus is to make distributed secure programming in JavaScript as effortless as possible. But much of the design of Dr. SES and its predecessors =-=[2,3,4]-=- was shaped by examining what we need to express smart contracts simply. Taking a rights-based approach to local and distributed computing, we believe, has led us to building a better general purpose ...

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...ctronic rights (erights) or smart contracts per se. Its focus is to make distributed secure programming in JavaScript as effortless as possible. But much of the design of Dr. SES and its predecessors =-=[2,3,4]-=- was shaped by examining what we need to express smart contracts simply. Taking a rights-based approach to local and distributed computing, we believe, has led us to building a better general purpose ...

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...ode here is working ES5 code, and is available at code.google.com/p/es-lab/source/browse/trunk/src/ses/#ses and its contract subdirectory. 5 Once the es-lab.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/src/ses/makeQ.js, =-=[5]-=-, and https://github.com/kriskowal/q implementations of Q are reconciled.Arrow functions. The following four lines all define a one parameter function which returns double its parameter. All bind a l...

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...ments. In an object-capability (ocap) language [7], an object can cause effects on the world outside itself only by using the references it holds. Some objects are transitively immutable or powerless =-=[8]-=-, while others might cause effects. An object must not be given any powerful references by default; any references it has implicit access to, such as language-provided global variables, must be powerl...

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...use of resources. Rights partition the space of actions to avoid interference between separately formulated plans, thus enabling cooperative relationships despite mutual suspicion and competing goals =-=[15]-=-. This rights-based perspective can shed light on the problem of securing distributed computational systems. All computational systems must address the problem of open access. Global mutable state cre...

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...y rights: possession of the reference is all that is required for its use, its use is at the discretion of the possessing entity, and the entity holding the reference is free to transfer it to others =-=[20]-=-. The private law system of property, contract, and tort brings resources into a system of rights. Property law determines the initial acquisition of rights; contract law governs the transfer of right...

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...rights, we can create new kinds of erights at a new level of abstraction. We look first at how money can be implemented as a smart contract. Money differs from other forms of property in several ways =-=[22]-=-. Here, we identify four dimensions in which money differs from object references as rights. Object references are shareable, specific, opaque, and exercisable, whereas money is exclusive, fungible, m...