Modal Logics for Mobile Processes Revisited

We revisit the logical characterisations of various bisimilarity relations for the finite fragment of the ?-calculus. Our starting point is the early and the late bisimilarity, first defined in the seminal work of Milner, Parrow and Walker, who also proved their characterisations in fragments of a modal logic (which we refer to as the MPW logic). Two important refinements of early and late bisimilarity, called open and quasi-open bisimilarity, respectively, were subsequently proposed by Sangiorgi and Walker. Horne, et. al., showed that open and quasi-bisimilarity are characterised by intuitionistic modal logics: OM (for open bisimilarity) and FM (for quasi-open bisimilarity). In this work, we attempt to unify the logical characterisations of these bisimilarity relations, showing that they can be characterised by different sublogics of a unifying logic. A key insight to this unification derives from a reformulation of the four bisimilarity relations (early, late, open and quasi-open) that uses an explicit name context, and an observation that these relations can be distinguished by the relative scoping of names and their instantiations in the name context. This name context and name substitution then give rise to an accessibility relation in the underlying Kripke semantics of our logic, that is captured logically by an S4-like modal operator. We then show that the MPW, the OM and the FM logics can be embedded into fragments of our unifying classical modal logic. In the case of OM and FM, the embedding uses the fact that intuitionistic implication can be encoded in modal logic S4

Multiple Congruence Relations, First-Order Theories on Terms, and the Frames of the Applied Pi-Calculus

International audienceWe investigate the problem of deciding first-order theories of finite trees with several distinguished congruence relations, each of them given by some equational axioms. We give an automata-based solution for the case where the different equational axiom systems are linear and variable-disjoint (this includes the case where all axioms are ground), and where the logic does not permit to express tree relations x=f(y,z). We show that the problem is undecidable when these restrictions are relaxed. As motivation and application, we show how to translate the model-checking problem of Apil, a spatial equational logic for the applied pi-calculus, to the validity of first-order formulas in term algebras with multiple congruence relations

Modal Logics for Nominal Transition Systems

We define a general notion of transition system where states and action labels can be from arbitrary nominal sets, actions may bind names, and state predicates from an arbitrary logic define properties of states. A Hennessy-Milner logic for these systems is introduced, and proved adequate and expressively complete for bisimulation equivalence. A main technical novelty is the use of finitely supported infinite conjunctions. We show how to treat different bisimulation variants such as early, late, open and weak in a systematic way, explore the folklore theorem that state predicates can be replaced by actions, and make substantial comparisons with related work. The main definitions and theorems have been formalised in Nominal Isabelle

A Logical Characterisation of Static Equivalence

AbstractThe work of Abadi and Fournet introduces the notion of a frame to describe the knowledge of the environment of a cryptographic protocol. Frames are lists of terms; two frames are indistinguishable under the notion of static equivalence if they satisfy the same equations on terms. We present a first-order logic for frames with quantification over environment knowledge which, under certain general conditions, characterizes static equivalence and is amenable to construction of characteristic formulae. The logic can be used to reason about environment knowledge and can be adapted to a particular application by defining a suitable signature and associated equational theory. The logic can furthermore be extended with modalities to yield a modal logic for e.g. the Applied Pi calculus