Actor Network Procedures as Psi-calculi for Security Ceremonies

The actor network procedures of Pavlovic and Meadows are a recent graphical formalism developed for describing security ceremonies and for reasoning about their security properties. The present work studies the relations of the actor network procedures (ANP) to the recent psi-calculi framework. Psi-calculi is a parametric formalism where calculi like spi- or applied-pi are found as instances. Psi-calculi are operational and largely non-graphical, but have strong foundation based on the theory of nominal sets and process algebras. One purpose of the present work is to give a semantics to ANP through psi-calculi. Another aim was to give a graphical language for a psi-calculus instance for security ceremonies. At the same time, this work provides more insight into the details of the ANPs formalization and the graphical representation.Comment: In Proceedings GraMSec 2014, arXiv:1404.163

Refining SCJ Mission Specifications into Parallel Handler Designs

Safety-Critical Java (SCJ) is a recent technology that restricts the execution and memory model of Java in such a way that applications can be statically analysed and certified for their real-time properties and safe use of memory. Our interest is in the development of comprehensive and sound techniques for the formal specification, refinement, design, and implementation of SCJ programs, using a correct-by-construction approach. As part of this work, we present here an account of laws and patterns that are of general use for the refinement of SCJ mission specifications into designs of parallel handlers used in the SCJ programming paradigm. Our notation is a combination of languages from the Circus family, supporting state-rich reactive models with the addition of class objects and real-time properties. Our work is a first step to elicit laws of programming for SCJ and fits into a refinement strategy that we have developed previously to derive SCJ programs.Comment: In Proceedings Refine 2013, arXiv:1305.563

Modelling and Simulation of Asynchronous Real-Time Systems using Timed Rebeca

In this paper we propose an extension of the Rebeca language that can be used to model distributed and asynchronous systems with timing constraints. We provide the formal semantics of the language using Structural Operational Semantics, and show its expressiveness by means of examples. We developed a tool for automated translation from timed Rebeca to the Erlang language, which provides a first implementation of timed Rebeca. We can use the tool to set the parameters of timed Rebeca models, which represent the environment and component variables, and use McErlang to run multiple simulations for different settings. Timed Rebeca restricts the modeller to a pure asynchronous actor-based paradigm, where the structure of the model represents the service oriented architecture, while the computational model matches the network infrastructure. Simulation is shown to be an effective analysis support, specially where model checking faces almost immediate state explosion in an asynchronous setting.Comment: In Proceedings FOCLASA 2011, arXiv:1107.584

Front propagation in laminar flows

The problem of front propagation in flowing media is addressed for laminar velocity fields in two dimensions. Three representative cases are discussed: stationary cellular flow, stationary shear flow, and percolating flow. Production terms of Fisher-Kolmogorov-Petrovskii-Piskunov type and of Arrhenius type are considered under the assumption of no feedback of the concentration on the velocity. Numerical simulations of advection-reaction-diffusion equations have been performed by an algorithm based on discrete-time maps. The results show a generic enhancement of the speed of front propagation by the underlying flow. For small molecular diffusivity, the front speed $V_f$ depends on the typical flow velocity $U$ as a power law with an exponent depending on the topological properties of the flow, and on the ratio of reactive and advective time-scales. For open-streamline flows we find always $V_f \sim U$, whereas for cellular flows we observe $V_f \sim U^{1/4}$ for fast advection, and $V_f \sim U^{3/4}$ for slow advection.Comment: Enlarged, revised version, 37 pages, 14 figure