A Safe Tcl Toolkit for Electronic Meeting Places

Electronic commerce needs electronic meeting places to conduct business. To be useful, such meeting places must be safe for all participants and for hosts (owners of places). In this paper we discuss safety issues for participants and hosts. We then describe a system we are building, Safe Tcl, that will allow the construction of electronic meeting places with a range of safety properties. Safe Tcl has two attractive properties. First, it uses a simple security model based on ``padded cells'' that allows participants to coexist and interact safely. Second, Tcl makes it easy to integrate the numerous facilities required in an electronic meeting place such as integrity verification and authentication.