A system of processes in which the interactions are solely through messages is often called loosely-coupled. Such systems are attractive from a programming viewpoint. They are designed by decomposing a specification into its separable concerns, each of which could then be implemented by a process; the operation of the system can be understood by asserting properties of the message sequences tra...

We present an approach to provide a fault-tolerant and secure service for sealed-bid auctions. The solution is designed for a loosely coupled publish-subscribe system. It employs multiple auction servers and achieves validity and security properties through application of secret-sharing methods and public-key encryption and signatures. It can tolerate Byzantine failures of one third of the auct...

We present a model for distributed systems, where each node consists of two kinds of contextfree devices: grammars generate sequences of messages due to their context-free production set, which are send over the network; pushdown automata accept or reject incoming network messages with respect to their recognition rules. Assuming that the network is a broadcast medium, i.e a local area network,...