Satisfiability of General Intruder Constraints with and without a Set Constructor

Many decision problems on security protocols can be reduced to solving so-called intruder constraints in Dolev Yao model. Most constraint solving procedures for protocol security rely on two properties of constraint systems called monotonicity and variable origination. In this work we relax these restrictions by giving a decision procedure for solving general intruder constraints (that do not have these properties) that stays in NP. Our result extends a first work by L. Mazar\'e in several directions: we allow non-atomic keys, and an associative, commutative and idempotent symbol (for modeling sets). We also discuss several new applications of the results.Comment: Submitted to the Special issue of Information and Computation on Security and Rewriting Techniques (SecReT), 2011. 59 page

Intersection types for unbind and rebind

We define a type system with intersection types for an extension of lambda-calculus with unbind and rebind operators. In this calculus, a term with free variables, representing open code, can be packed into an "unbound" term, and passed around as a value. In order to execute inside code, an unbound term should be explicitly rebound at the point where it is used. Unbinding and rebinding are hierarchical, that is, the term can contain arbitrarily nested unbound terms, whose inside code can only be executed after a sequence of rebinds has been applied. Correspondingly, types are decorated with levels, and a term has type decorated with k if it needs k rebinds in order to reduce to a value. With intersection types we model the fact that a term can be used differently in contexts providing different numbers of unbinds. In particular, top-level terms, that is, terms not requiring unbinds to reduce to values, should have a value type, that is, an intersection type where at least one element has level 0. With the proposed intersection type system we get soundness under the call-by-value strategy, an issue which was not resolved by previous type systems.Comment: In Proceedings ITRS 2010, arXiv:1101.410

Rasiowa–Harrop disjunction property

We show that there is a purely proof-theoretic proof of the Rasiowa–Harrop disjunction property for the full intuitionistic propositional calculus (IPC), via natural deduction, in which commuting conversions are not needed. Such proof is based on a sound and faithful embedding of IPC into an atomic polymorphic system. This result strengthens a homologous result for the disjunction property of IPC (presented in a recent paper co-authored with Fernando Ferreira) and answers a question then posed by Pierluigi Minari.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

A Tale of Two Nortons

This paper considers Norton’s Material Theory of Induction. The material theory aims inter alia to neutralize Hume’s Problem of Induction. The purpose of the paper is to evaluate the material theorys capacity to achieve this end. After pulling apart two versions of the theory, I argue that neither version satisfactorily neutralizes the problem

Scientific Knowledge Object Patterns

Web technology is revolutionizing the way diverse scientific knowledge is produced and disseminated. In the past few years, a handful of discourse representation models have been proposed for the externalization of the rhetoric and argumentation captured within scientific publications. However, there hasn’t been a unified interoperable pattern that is commonly used in practice by publishers and individual users yet. In this paper, we introduce the Scientific Knowledge Object Patterns (SKO Patterns) towards a general scientific discourse representation model, especially for managing knowledge in emerging social web and semantic web. © ACM, 2011. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version is going to be published in "Proceedings of 15th European Conference on Pattern Languages of Programs", (2011) http://portal.acm.org/event.cfm?id=RE197&CFID=8795862&CFTOKEN=1476113

A direct proof of the confluence of combinatory strong reduction

I give a proof of the confluence of combinatory strong reduction that does not use the one of lambda-calculus. I also give simple and direct proofs of a standardization theorem for this reduction and the strong normalization of simply typed terms.Comment: To appear in TC

A Divergence Critic for Inductive Proof

Inductive theorem provers often diverge. This paper describes a simple critic, a computer program which monitors the construction of inductive proofs attempting to identify diverging proof attempts. Divergence is recognized by means of a ``difference matching'' procedure. The critic then proposes lemmas and generalizations which ``ripple'' these differences away so that the proof can go through without divergence. The critic enables the theorem prover Spike to prove many theorems completely automatically from the definitions alone.Comment: See http://www.jair.org/ for any accompanying file