A Calculus of Mobile Resources

We introduce a calculus of Mobile Resources (MR) tailored for the design and analysis of systems containing mobile, possibly nested, computing devices that may have resource and access constraints, and which are not copyable nor modifiable per se. We provide a reduction as well as a labelled transition semantics and prove a correspondence be- tween barbed bisimulation congruence and a higher-order bisimulation. We provide examples of the expressiveness of the calculus, and apply the theory to prove one of its characteristic properties

PicNIc - Pi-calculus Non-Interference checker

PICNIC is a tool for verifying security properties of systems, namely non-interference properties of processes expressed as terms of the pi-calculus with two security levels and declassification primitives. More precisely, it checks whether inserting a process into two different high contexts no information leakage to the low level observers occurs. These properties are decidable over finite control processes, but decidability can be extended by compositionality also to some infinite state processes. Notably, PICNIC has been developed in Fresh OpsilaCaML, a dialect of CaML with native support for binders and fresh/local names; thus, this work can be seen also as a non-trivial case study about the applicability of these new programming languages

Name-passing calculi and crypto-primitives: A survey

The paper surveys the literature on high-level name-passing process calculi, and their extensions with cryptographic primitives. The survey is by no means exhaustive, for essentially two reasons. First, in trying to provide a coherent presentation of different ideas and techniques, one inevitably ends up leaving out the approaches that do not fit the intended roadmap. Secondly, the literature on the subject has been growing at very high rate over the years. As a consequence, we decided to concentrate on few papers that introduce the main ideas, in the hope that discussing them in some detail will provide sufficient insight for further reading

Adequacy Issues in Reactive Systems: Barbed Semantics for Mobile Ambients

Reactive systems represent a meta-framework aimed at deriving behavioral congruences for those specification formalisms whose operational semantics is provided by rewriting rules. The aim of this thesis is to address one of the main issues of the framework, concerning the adequacy of the standard observational semantics (the IPO and the saturated one) in modelling the concrete semantics of actual formalisms. The problem is that IPO-bisimilarity (obtained considering only minimal labels) is often too discriminating, while the saturated one (via all labels) may be too coarse, and intermediate proposals should then be put forward. We then introduce a more expressive semantics for reactive systems which, thanks to its flexibility, allows for recasting a wide variety of observational, bisimulation-based equivalences. In particular, we propose suitable notions of barbed and weak barbed semantics for reactive systems, and an efficient characterization of them through the IPO-transition systems. We also propose a novel, more general behavioural equivalence: L-bisimilarity, which is able to recast both its IPO and saturated counterparts, as well as the barbed one. The equivalence is parametric with respect to a set L of reactive systems labels, and it is shown that under mild conditions on L it is a congruence. In order to provide a suitable test-bed, we instantiate our proposal over the asynchronous CCS and, most importantly, over the mobile ambients calculus, whose semantics is still in a flux

Aspects of Algebraic Quantum Theory: a Tribute to Hans Primas

This paper outlines the common ground between the motivations lying behind Hans Primas' algebraic approach to quantum phenomena and those lying behind David Bohm's approach which led to his notion of implicate/explicate order. This connection has been made possible by the recent application of orthogonal Clifford algebraic techniques to the de Broglie-Bohm approach for relativistic systems with spin.Comment: 18 pages. No figure

Compositional Reasoning for Explicit Resource Management in Channel-Based Concurrency

We define a pi-calculus variant with a costed semantics where channels are treated as resources that must explicitly be allocated before they are used and can be deallocated when no longer required. We use a substructural type system tracking permission transfer to construct coinductive proof techniques for comparing behaviour and resource usage efficiency of concurrent processes. We establish full abstraction results between our coinductive definitions and a contextual behavioural preorder describing a notion of process efficiency w.r.t. its management of resources. We also justify these definitions and respective proof techniques through numerous examples and a case study comparing two concurrent implementations of an extensible buffer.Comment: 51 pages, 7 figure

Understanding quantization: a hidden variable model

We argue that to solve the foundational problems of quantum theory one has to first understand what it means to quantize a classical system. We then propose a quantization method based on replacement of deterministic c-numbers by stochastically-parameterized c-numbers. Unlike canonical quantization, the method is free from operator ordering ambiguity and the resulting quantum system has a straightforward interpretation as statistical modification of ensemble of classical trajectories. We then develop measurement without wave function collapse \`a la pilot-wave theory and point out new testable predictions.Comment: 16 pages, based on a talk given at "Emergent Quantum Mechanics (Heinz von Foerster Conference 2011)", see http://iopscience.iop.org/1742-6596/361/