HipHopSec is an Inria/Northwestern associated team studying new programming environment for IoT devices.
Nowadays most applications are distributed, that is, they run on several computers: a mobile device for the graphical user interface a gateway for storing data in a local area; a remote server of a large cloud platform for resource demanding computing; an object connected to Internet in the IoT (Internet of Things); etc. For many different reasons, this makes programming much more difficult than it was when only a single computer was involved:
Applications are composed of extensive lists of diverse components, each coming with their own specification and imposing its own constraints on application development.
Due to the distributed nature of the applications, developers have to implement appropriate communication protocols, which is difficult to do correctly and securely.
Communicating applications need to resort to parallelism to handle requests from their clients with acceptable latency. No matter whether it is multi-threading (as in Java) or asynchronous programming (as in JavaScript/Node.js), this style of programming is notoriously difficult and error-prone.
The Inria Indes, Northwestern University, and College de France teams are working together to propose solutions that address the aforementioned problems. Combined together, they could lead to a robust and secure execution environment for the web and IoT programming.