4,611 research outputs found
Compositional closure for Bayes Risk in probabilistic noninterference
We give a sequential model for noninterference security including probability
(but not demonic choice), thus supporting reasoning about the likelihood that
high-security values might be revealed by observations of low-security
activity. Our novel methodological contribution is the definition of a
refinement order and its use to compare security measures between
specifications and (their supposed) implementations. This contrasts with the
more common practice of evaluating the security of individual programs in
isolation.
The appropriateness of our model and order is supported by our showing that
our refinement order is the greatest compositional relation --the compositional
closure-- with respect to our semantics and an "elementary" order based on
Bayes Risk --- a security measure already in widespread use. We also relate
refinement to other measures such as Shannon Entropy.
By applying the approach to a non-trivial example, the anonymous-majority
Three-Judges protocol, we demonstrate by example that correctness arguments can
be simplified by the sort of layered developments --through levels of
increasing detail-- that are allowed and encouraged by compositional semantics
R\'enyi Divergence and Kullback-Leibler Divergence
R\'enyi divergence is related to R\'enyi entropy much like Kullback-Leibler
divergence is related to Shannon's entropy, and comes up in many settings. It
was introduced by R\'enyi as a measure of information that satisfies almost the
same axioms as Kullback-Leibler divergence, and depends on a parameter that is
called its order. In particular, the R\'enyi divergence of order 1 equals the
Kullback-Leibler divergence.
We review and extend the most important properties of R\'enyi divergence and
Kullback-Leibler divergence, including convexity, continuity, limits of
-algebras and the relation of the special order 0 to the Gaussian
dichotomy and contiguity. We also show how to generalize the Pythagorean
inequality to orders different from 1, and we extend the known equivalence
between channel capacity and minimax redundancy to continuous channel inputs
(for all orders) and present several other minimax results.Comment: To appear in IEEE Transactions on Information Theor
Property testing for distributions on partially ordered sets
Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2007.Includes bibliographical references (p. 24).We survey the results of Rubinfeld, Batu et al. ([2], [3]) on testing distributions for monotonicity, and testing distributions known to be monotone for uniformity. We extend some of their results to new partial orders, and provide evidence for some new conjectural lower bounds. Our results apply to various partial orders: bipartite graphs, lines,, trees, grids, and hypercubes.by Punyashloka Biswal.M.Eng
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