First week at UCI

My first week has been rather nice and relaxing. I’ve got much of my paperwork covered with respect to RAship, ID card, finding shops and stuff around the area. My roomates are cool and mellow (and have similar philosophical/religious views). So far, it looks like I’ll be working on Information Flow in SpiderMonkey. The dissertations that I’ve been assigned to read have already given me some ideas.

Object tagging: In order to implement Information Flow each object or data field (henceforth entity) is tagged with a Top Secret/Secret/Sensitive/Unclass label. A body of code (or xml file) then describes a policy that details how each entity is tagged after interacting with other entities. So if A is tagged secret, and B is tagged secret, and C = A+B, a usual default policy is to have C tagged secret. There is, however, no real reason why this means of describing object interaction should remain specific to security policies. I don’t have any examples at hand, but the general ability for programmers to be able to tag objects, and then describe a semantics of tag interaction, would probably have many other uses.