A Gentle Introduction to Multiparty Asynchronous Session Types

Abstract

Abstract. This article provides a gentle introduction to multiparty session types, a class of behavioural types specifically targeted at describing protocols in distributed systems based on asynchronous communication. The type system ensures well-typed processes to enjoy non-trivial properties, including communication safety, protocol fidelity, as well as progress. The adoption of multiparty session types can positively affect the whole software lifecycle, from design to deployment, improving software reliability and reducing its development costs.

Relating Process Languages for Security and Communication Correctness (Extended Abstract)

“…Concretely, next we shall connect typability for S processes with satifiability for A processes. To formalize these results, we first recall some essential notions for multiparty session types; the reader is referred to [5,10] for an in-depth presentation.…”

“…-A, a (low-level) applied π-calculus in which processes explicitly describe term communication, cryptographic operations, and state manipulation [12]; -S, a (high-level) π-calculus in which communication actions are organized as multiparty session protocols [5,10].…”

Certifying Data in Multiparty Session Types

“…The standard theory of multiparty session types [3,8] is able to ensure a strong form of progress within a single multiparty session (i.e. when a system is composed solely of well-typed processes implementing every role in a multiparty session, but not participating in any other linear sessions).…”

“…While a wide range of works on binary and multiparty session types exist in the literature [3,4,9,10], the two that are most related to this work consist of the logically-motivated value dependent binary session types of [2,12,17] and the assertion-based extensions of multiparty session types [1].…”

“…A more general view of a session is that it combines multiple interactions forming a meaningful scenario into a single logical unit, offering a basic programming abstraction for communicating processes. Given that in a wide range of application scenarios it is necessary to coordinate multiple communicating agents, multiparty session types (MPST) are proposed in [3,8] to enable the specification of interactions involving multiple peers from a global perspective. This global specification is then automatically mapped (or projected) to local types against which a conformance of each individual endpoint process is validated.…”