arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Riccardo Pucella.
This article examines the interpretation of the LTL temporal operators over finite and infinite sequences. This is used as the basis for deriving a sound and complete axiomatization for Caret, a recent temporal logic for reasoning about programs with nested procedure calls and returns.
We define the notion of a partially additive Kleene algebra, which is a Kleene algebra where the + operation need only be partially defined. These structures formalize a number of examples that cannot be handled directly by Kleene algebras. We relate partially additive Kleene algebras to existing algebraic structures, by exhibiting categorical connections with Kleene algebras, partially additive categories, and closed semirings.
In this paper we present a framework for creating natural language interfaces to action-based applications. Our framework uses a number of reusable application-independent components, in order to reduce the effort of creating a natural language interface for a given application. Using a type-logical grammar, we first translate natural language sentences into expressions in an extended higher-order logic. These expressions can be seen as executable specifications corresponding to the original sentences. The executable specifications are then interpreted by invoking appropriate procedures provided by the application for which a natural language interface is being created.
Web services security specifications are typically expressed as a mixture of XML schemas, example messages, and narrative explanations. We propose a new specification language for writing complementary machine-checkable descriptions of SOAP-based security protocols and their properties. Our TulaFale language is based on the pi calculus (for writing collections of SOAP processors running in parallel), plus XML syntax (to express SOAP messaging), logical predicates (to construct and filter SOAP messages), and correspondence assertions (to specify authentication goals of protocols). Our implementation compiles TulaFale into the applied pi calculus, and then runs Blanchet's resolution-based protocol verifier. Hence, we can automatically verify authentication properties of SOAP protocols.
An XML web service is, to a first approximation, an RPC service in which requests and responses are encoded in XML as SOAP envelopes, and transported over HTTP. We consider the problem of authenticating requests and responses at the SOAP-level, rather than relying on transport-level security. We propose a security abstraction, inspired by earlier work on secure RPC, in which the methods exported by a web service are annotated with one of three security levels: none, authenticated, or both authenticated and encrypted. We model our abstraction as an object calculus with primitives for defining and calling web services. We describe the semantics of our object calculus by translating to a lower-level language with primitives for message passing and cryptography. To validate our semantics, we embed correspondence assertions that specify the correct authentication of requests and responses. By appeal to the type theory for cryptographic protocols of Gordon and Jeffrey's Cryptyc, we verify the correspondence assertions simply by typing. Finally, we describe an implementation of our semantics via custom SOAP headers.
This article illustrates the use of a logical specification language to capture various forms of confidentiality properties used in the security literature.
Kleene algebra with tests is an extension of Kleene algebra, the algebra of regular expressions, which can be used to reason about programs. We develop a coalgebraic theory of Kleene algebra with tests, along the lines of the coalgebraic theory of regular expressions based on deterministic automata. Since the known automata-theoretic presentation of Kleene algebra with tests does not lend itself to a coalgebraic theory, we define a new interpretation of Kleene algebra with tests expressions and a corresponding automata-theoretic presentation. One outcome of the theory is a coinductive proof principle, that can be used to establish equivalence of our Kleene algebra with tests expressions.
Recent results of Bucciarelli show that the semilattice of degrees of parallelism of first-order boolean functions in PCF has both infinite chains and infinite antichains. By considering a simple subclass of Sieber's sequentiality relations, we identify levels in the semilattice and derive inexpressibility results concerning functions on different levels. This allows us to further explore the structure of the semilattice of degrees of parallelism: we identify semilattices characterized by simple level properties, and show the existence of new infinite hierarchies which are in a certain sense natural with respect to the levels.
We present a concurrent framework for Win32 programming based on Concurrent ML, a concurrent language with higher-order functions, static typing, lightweight threads and synchronous communication channels. The key points of the framework are the move from an event loop model to a threaded model for the processing of window messages, and the decoupling of controls notifications from the system messages. This last point allows us to derive a general way of writing controls that leads to easy composition, and can accommodate ActiveX Controls in a transparent way.
Lambek's production machines may be used to generate and recognize sentences in a subset of the language described by a production grammar. We determine in this paper the subset of the language of a grammar generated and recognized by such machines.
A useful programming language needs to support writing programs that take advantage of services and communication mechanisms supplied by the operating system. We examine the problem of programming native Win32 applications under Windows with Standard ML. We introduce an framework based on the IDL interface language et a minimal foreign-functions interface to explore the Win32 API et COM in the context of Standard ML.
We present in this paper the preliminary design of a module system based on a notion of components such as they are found in COM. This module system is inspired from that of Standard ML, and features first-class instances of components, first-class interfaces, and interface-polymorphic functions, as well as allowing components to be both imported from the environment and exported to the environment using simple mechanisms. The module system automates the memory management of interfaces and hides the IUnknown interface and QueryInterface mechanisms from the programmer, favoring instead a higher-level approach to handling interfaces.
Practical implementations of high-level languages must provide access to libraries and system services that have APIs specified in a low-level language (usually C). An important characteristic of such mechanisms is the foreign-interface policy that defines how to bridge the semantic gap between the high-level language and C. For example, IDL-based tools generate code to marshal data into and out of the high-level representation according to user annotations. The design space of foreign-interface policies is large and there are pros and cons to each approach. Rather than commit to a particular policy, we choose to focus on the problem of supporting a gamut of interoperability policies. In this paper, we describe a framework for language interoperability that is expressive enough to support very efficient implementations of a wide range of different foreign-interface policies. We describe two tools that implement substantially different policies on top of our framework and present benchmarks that demonstrate their efficiency.
Reactive systems are systems that maintain an ongoing interaction with their environment, activated by receiving input events from the environment and producing output events in response. Modern programming languages designed to program such systems use a paradigm based on the notions of instants and activations. We describe a library for Standard ML that provides basic primitives for programming reactive systems. The library is a low-level system upon which more sophisticated reactive behaviors can be built, which provides a convenient framework for prototyping extensions to existing reactive languages.
We present a logic for reasoning about licenses, which are ``terms of use'' for digital resources. The logic provides a language for writing both properties of licenses and specifications that govern a client's actions. We discuss the complexity of checking properties and specifications written in our logic and propose a technique for verification. A key feature of our approach is that it is essentially parameterized by the language in which the licenses are written, provided that this language can be given a trace-based semantics. We consider two license languages to illustrate this flexibility.
We present a propositional logic %which can be used to reason about the uncertainty of events, where the uncertainty is modeled by a set of probability measures assigning an interval of probability to each event. We give a sound and complete axiomatization for the logic, and show that the satisfiability problem is NP-complete, no harder than satisfiability for propositional logic.
Strand spaces are a popular framework for the analysis of security protocols. Strand spaces have some similarities to a formalism used successfully to model protocols for distributed systems, namely multi-agent systems. We explore the exact relationship between these two frameworks here. It turns out that a key difference is the handling of agents, which are unspecified in strand spaces and explicit in multi-agent systems. We provide a family of translations from strand spaces to multi-agent systems parameterized by the choice of agents in the strand space. We also show that not every multi-agent system of interest can be expressed as a strand space. This reveals a lack of expressiveness in the strand-space framework that can be characterized by our translation. To highlight this lack of expressiveness, we show one simple way in which strand spaces can be extended to model more systems.
We describe an approach to programming rule-based systems in Standard ML, with a focus on so-called overlapping rules, that is rules that can still be active when other rules are fired. Such rules are useful when implementing rule-based reactive systems, and to that effect we show a simple implementation of Loyall's Active Behavior Trees, used to control goal-directed agents in the Oz virtual environment. We discuss an implementation of our framework using a reactive library geared towards implementing those kind of systems.