28,325 research outputs found
An Experiment in Ping-Pong Protocol Verification by Nondeterministic Pushdown Automata
An experiment is described that confirms the security of a well-studied class
of cryptographic protocols (Dolev-Yao intruder model) can be verified by
two-way nondeterministic pushdown automata (2NPDA). A nondeterministic pushdown
program checks whether the intersection of a regular language (the protocol to
verify) and a given Dyck language containing all canceling words is empty. If
it is not, an intruder can reveal secret messages sent between trusted users.
The verification is guaranteed to terminate in cubic time at most on a
2NPDA-simulator. The interpretive approach used in this experiment simplifies
the verification, by separating the nondeterministic pushdown logic and program
control, and makes it more predictable. We describe the interpretive approach
and the known transformational solutions, and show they share interesting
features. Also noteworthy is how abstract results from automata theory can
solve practical problems by programming language means.Comment: In Proceedings MARS/VPT 2018, arXiv:1803.0866
Streaming Verification of Graph Computations via Graph Structure
We give new algorithms in the annotated data streaming setting - also known as verifiable data stream computation - for certain graph problems. This setting is meant to model outsourced computation, where a space-bounded verifier limited to sequential data access seeks to overcome its computational limitations by engaging a powerful prover, without needing to trust the prover. As is well established, several problems that admit no sublinear-space algorithms under traditional streaming do allow protocols using a sublinear amount of prover/verifier communication and sublinear-space verification. We give algorithms for many well-studied graph problems including triangle counting, its generalization to subgraph counting, maximum matching, problems about the existence (or not) of short paths, finding the shortest path between two vertices, and testing for an independent set. While some of these problems have been studied before, our results achieve new tradeoffs between space and communication costs that were hitherto unknown. In particular, two of our results disprove explicit conjectures of Thaler (ICALP, 2016) by giving triangle counting and maximum matching algorithms for n-vertex graphs, using o(n) space and o(n^2) communication
Computer-aided verification in mechanism design
In mechanism design, the gold standard solution concepts are dominant
strategy incentive compatibility and Bayesian incentive compatibility. These
solution concepts relieve the (possibly unsophisticated) bidders from the need
to engage in complicated strategizing. While incentive properties are simple to
state, their proofs are specific to the mechanism and can be quite complex.
This raises two concerns. From a practical perspective, checking a complex
proof can be a tedious process, often requiring experts knowledgeable in
mechanism design. Furthermore, from a modeling perspective, if unsophisticated
agents are unconvinced of incentive properties, they may strategize in
unpredictable ways.
To address both concerns, we explore techniques from computer-aided
verification to construct formal proofs of incentive properties. Because formal
proofs can be automatically checked, agents do not need to manually check the
properties, or even understand the proof. To demonstrate, we present the
verification of a sophisticated mechanism: the generic reduction from Bayesian
incentive compatible mechanism design to algorithm design given by Hartline,
Kleinberg, and Malekian. This mechanism presents new challenges for formal
verification, including essential use of randomness from both the execution of
the mechanism and from the prior type distributions. As an immediate
consequence, our work also formalizes Bayesian incentive compatibility for the
entire family of mechanisms derived via this reduction. Finally, as an
intermediate step in our formalization, we provide the first formal
verification of incentive compatibility for the celebrated
Vickrey-Clarke-Groves mechanism
Semi-Streaming Algorithms for Annotated Graph Streams
Considerable effort has been devoted to the development of streaming
algorithms for analyzing massive graphs. Unfortunately, many results have been
negative, establishing that a wide variety of problems require
space to solve. One of the few bright spots has been the development of
semi-streaming algorithms for a handful of graph problems -- these algorithms
use space .
In the annotated data streaming model of Chakrabarti et al., a
computationally limited client wants to compute some property of a massive
input, but lacks the resources to store even a small fraction of the input, and
hence cannot perform the desired computation locally. The client therefore
accesses a powerful but untrusted service provider, who not only performs the
requested computation, but also proves that the answer is correct.
We put forth the notion of semi-streaming algorithms for annotated graph
streams (semi-streaming annotation schemes for short). These are protocols in
which both the client's space usage and the length of the proof are . We give evidence that semi-streaming annotation schemes
represent a substantially more robust solution concept than does the standard
semi-streaming model. On the positive side, we give semi-streaming annotation
schemes for two dynamic graph problems that are intractable in the standard
model: (exactly) counting triangles, and (exactly) computing maximum matchings.
The former scheme answers a question of Cormode. On the negative side, we
identify for the first time two natural graph problems (connectivity and
bipartiteness in a certain edge update model) that can be solved in the
standard semi-streaming model, but cannot be solved by annotation schemes of
"sub-semi-streaming" cost. That is, these problems are just as hard in the
annotations model as they are in the standard model.Comment: This update includes some additional discussion of the results
proven. The result on counting triangles was previously included in an ECCC
technical report by Chakrabarti et al. available at
http://eccc.hpi-web.de/report/2013/180/. That report has been superseded by
this manuscript, and the CCC 2015 paper "Verifiable Stream Computation and
Arthur-Merlin Communication" by Chakrabarti et a
Multispectral Palmprint Encoding and Recognition
Palmprints are emerging as a new entity in multi-modal biometrics for human
identification and verification. Multispectral palmprint images captured in the
visible and infrared spectrum not only contain the wrinkles and ridge structure
of a palm, but also the underlying pattern of veins; making them a highly
discriminating biometric identifier. In this paper, we propose a feature
encoding scheme for robust and highly accurate representation and matching of
multispectral palmprints. To facilitate compact storage of the feature, we
design a binary hash table structure that allows for efficient matching in
large databases. Comprehensive experiments for both identification and
verification scenarios are performed on two public datasets -- one captured
with a contact-based sensor (PolyU dataset), and the other with a contact-free
sensor (CASIA dataset). Recognition results in various experimental setups show
that the proposed method consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art
methods. Error rates achieved by our method (0.003% on PolyU and 0.2% on CASIA)
are the lowest reported in literature on both dataset and clearly indicate the
viability of palmprint as a reliable and promising biometric. All source codes
are publicly available.Comment: Preliminary version of this manuscript was published in ICCV 2011. Z.
Khan A. Mian and Y. Hu, "Contour Code: Robust and Efficient Multispectral
Palmprint Encoding for Human Recognition", International Conference on
Computer Vision, 2011. MATLAB Code available:
https://sites.google.com/site/zohaibnet/Home/code
Automatic Verification of Erlang-Style Concurrency
This paper presents an approach to verify safety properties of Erlang-style,
higher-order concurrent programs automatically. Inspired by Core Erlang, we
introduce Lambda-Actor, a prototypical functional language with
pattern-matching algebraic data types, augmented with process creation and
asynchronous message-passing primitives. We formalise an abstract model of
Lambda-Actor programs called Actor Communicating System (ACS) which has a
natural interpretation as a vector addition system, for which some verification
problems are decidable. We give a parametric abstract interpretation framework
for Lambda-Actor and use it to build a polytime computable, flow-based,
abstract semantics of Lambda-Actor programs, which we then use to bootstrap the
ACS construction, thus deriving a more accurate abstract model of the input
program. We have constructed Soter, a tool implementation of the verification
method, thereby obtaining the first fully-automatic, infinite-state model
checker for a core fragment of Erlang. We find that in practice our abstraction
technique is accurate enough to verify an interesting range of safety
properties. Though the ACS coverability problem is Expspace-complete, Soter can
analyse these verification problems surprisingly efficiently.Comment: 12 pages plus appendix, 4 figures, 1 table. The tool is available at
http://mjolnir.cs.ox.ac.uk/soter
The efficient certification of knottedness and Thurston norm
We show that the problem of determining whether a knot in the 3-sphere is
non-trivial lies in NP. This is a consequence of the following more general
result. The problem of determining whether the Thurston norm of a second
homology class in a compact orientable 3-manifold is equal to a given integer
is in NP. As a corollary, the problem of determining the genus of a knot in the
3-sphere is in NP. We also show that the problem of determining whether a
compact orientable 3-manifold has incompressible boundary is in NP.Comment: 101 pages, 24 figures; v2 contains some improvements suggested by the
referee, which have strengthened the main theorem
Reference face graph for face recognition
Face recognition has been studied extensively; however, real-world face recognition still remains a challenging task. The demand for unconstrained practical face recognition is rising with the explosion of online multimedia such as social networks, and video surveillance footage where face analysis is of significant importance. In this paper, we approach face recognition in the context of graph theory. We recognize an unknown face using an external reference face graph (RFG). An RFG is generated and recognition of a given face is achieved by comparing it to the faces in the constructed RFG. Centrality measures are utilized to identify distinctive faces in the reference face graph. The proposed RFG-based face recognition algorithm is robust to the changes in pose and it is also alignment free. The RFG recognition is used in conjunction with DCT locality sensitive hashing for efficient retrieval to ensure scalability. Experiments are conducted on several publicly available databases and the results show that the proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods without any preprocessing necessities such as face alignment. Due to the richness in the reference set construction, the proposed method can also handle illumination and expression variation
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