This thesis proposes a new approach to parallelism and concurrency, laying the basis for the design of a programming language with a clear and simple formal semantics, enjoying both safety and security properties, while lending itself to an implementation on multicore architectures. We adopted the synchronous programming paradigm, in its reactive variant, which provides a simple alternative to standard concurrent programming by limiting the impact of time-dependent errors ("data-races"). As a first step (Part 1), we considered a reactive orchestration language, DSL, which abstracts away from the memory. To set the basis for a formal treatment of memory and security, we then focussed on a reactive kernel, CRL, equipped with a deterministic parallel operator (Part 2). We proved bounded reactivity of CRL programs. Next, we enriched CRL with mechanisms for information flow control (Part 3). To this end, we first extended CRL with security levels for data. We then defined a type system on the extended language, SSL, which ensures the absence of information leaks. Finally, we added memory to CRL, as well as the notions of agent and site, thus obtaining the model DSLM (Part 4). We structured the memory in such a way that data-races cannot occur, neither within nor among agents. We also investigated the implementation of DSLM on multicore architectures, using the possibility of agent migration between sites. The unification of SSL and DSLM is left for future work.
