[boston-lisp] Next Boston Lisp Meeting: Monday July 21st 2008, 6pm at MIT 34-401B

[Faré]

Next Boston Lisp Meeting: Monday July 21st 2008, 6pm at MIT 34-401B

NB1: I apologize for the late announcement and the short notice.

NB2: ITA Software, a fine employer of Lisp hackers (disclosure: I work
there), is kindly purchasing a buffet to accompany our Monthly Boston
Lisp Meeting. Anyone who attends is welcome to partake. We appreciate
it if you let us know you're coming, and what food taboos you have, so
that we can order the right amount of food. Tell us by sending email
to boston-lisp-meeting-register at common-lisp.net. We won't send any
acknowledgment unless requested; importantly, we'll keep your identity
and address confidential and won't communicate any such information to
anyone, not even to our sponsors.

*

Jay McCarthy will give a 25' talk about Cryptographic Protocol
Explication and End-Point Projection.

Cryptographic protocols are useful for engineering trust in
transactions. There are several languages for describing these
protocols, but these tend to capture the communications from the
perspective of an individual role. In contrast, traditional protocol
descriptions as found in a state of nature tend to employ a
whole-protocol description, resulting in an impedance mismatch.

In this talk we present two results to address this gap between human
descriptions and deployable specifications. The first is an end-point
projection technique that consumes an explicit whole-protocol
description and generates specifications that capture the behavior of
each participant role. In practice, however, many whole-protocol
descriptions contain idiomatic forms of implicit specification. We
therefore present our second result, a transformation that identifies
and eliminates these implicit patterns, thereby preparing protocols
for end-point projection.

Concretely, our tools consume protocols written in our whole-protocol
language, WPPL, and generate role descriptions in the cryptographic
protocol programming language, CPPL. We have formalized and
established properties of the transformations using the Coq proof
assistant. We have validated our transformations by applying them
successfully to almost all the protocols in the SPORE repository.
This talk will be based off a paper co-authored that has been accepted
at ESORICS, a joint work with Shriram Krisnamurthi.

Jay McCarthy http://jay.teammccarthy.org/ is completing his PhD at
Brown University under Shriram Krisnamurthi, and will be a professor
of Computer Science next year at Brigham Young University.

* *

There may or may not be a second speaker (to be announced), or some
other community activity. Suggestions sought.

* * *

Please note that the meeting is taking place not at NEU (like previous
times) but at MIT (like the times before that). The location is
subject to change but the usual room will hopefully be confirmed soon.
Please also note that the date is next week. My apologies once again
for the short notice.

The Lisp Meeting will take place on Monday July 21st at MIT, Room 34-401B.

As the numbers indicate, this is in Building 34, on the 4th floor.

MIT map: http://whereis.mit.edu/bin/map?selection=34

Google map: http://maps.google.com/maps?q=50+Vassar+St,+Cambridge,+MA+02139,+USA

Many thanks go to Alexey Radul for arranging for the room, and to MIT
for welcoming us.

* * * *

The previous Boston Lisp Meeting on June 25th was a success despite
only 34 participants. Those who didn't come missed two very
interesting presentations, followed by great food and intense
discussion.

We're always looking for more speakers. The call for speakers and all
the other details are at http://fare.livejournal.com/120393.html

Please forward this information to people you think would be
interested. Please accept my apologies for your receiving this message
multiple times.

For more information, see our new web site boston-lisp.org. For posts
related to the Boston Lisp meetings in general, follow this link:
http://fare.livejournal.com/tag/boston-lisp-meeting or subscribe to
our RSS feed: http://fare.livejournal.com/data/rss?tag=boston-lisp-meeting