Declarative testing and depolyment of distributed systems

System administrators and developers who deploy distributed systems have to deal with a deployment process that is largely manual and hard to reproduce. This paper describes how networks of computer systems can be reproducibly and automatically deployed from declarative specifications. Reproducibility also ensures that users can easily...

NixOS: A purely functional Linux distribution

Existing package and system configuration management tools suffer from an imperative model, where system administration actions such as package upgrades or changes to system configuration files are stateful: they destructively update the state of the system. This leads to many problems, such as the inability to roll back changes easily, to...

Preventing Injection Attacks with Syntax Embeddings: A Host and Guest Language Independent Approach

Software written in one language often needs to construct sentences in another language, such as SQL queries, XML output, or shell command invocations. This is almost always done using unhygienic string manipulation, the concatenation of constants and client-supplied strings. A client can then supply specially crafted input that causes the...