Trading-Off Type-Inference Memory Complexity against Communication

While bringing considerable flexibility and extending the horizons of mobile computing, mobile code raises major security issues. Hence, mobile code, such as Java applets, needs to be analyzed before execution. The byte-code verifier checks low-level security properties that ensure that the downloaded code cannot bypass the virtual machine’s security mechanisms. One of the statically ensured properties is type safety. The type-inference phase is the overwhelming resource-consuming part of the verification process.