13 research outputs found
A Tighter Bound for the Determinization of Visibly Pushdown Automata
Visibly pushdown automata (VPA), introduced by Alur and Madhusuan in 2004, is
a subclass of pushdown automata whose stack behavior is completely determined
by the input symbol according to a fixed partition of the input alphabet. Since
its introduce, VPAs have been shown to be useful in various context, e.g., as
specification formalism for verification and as automaton model for processing
XML streams. Due to high complexity, however, implementation of formal
verification based on VPA framework is a challenge. In this paper we consider
the problem of implementing VPA-based model checking algorithms. For doing so,
we first present an improvement on upper bound for determinization of VPA.
Next, we propose simple on-the-fly algorithms to check universality and
inclusion problems of this automata class. Then, we implement the proposed
algorithms in a prototype tool. Finally, we conduct experiments on randomly
generated VPAs. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithms are
considerably faster than the standard ones
A Grammatical Inference Approach to Language-Based Anomaly Detection in XML
False-positives are a problem in anomaly-based intrusion detection systems.
To counter this issue, we discuss anomaly detection for the eXtensible Markup
Language (XML) in a language-theoretic view. We argue that many XML-based
attacks target the syntactic level, i.e. the tree structure or element content,
and syntax validation of XML documents reduces the attack surface. XML offers
so-called schemas for validation, but in real world, schemas are often
unavailable, ignored or too general. In this work-in-progress paper we describe
a grammatical inference approach to learn an automaton from example XML
documents for detecting documents with anomalous syntax.
We discuss properties and expressiveness of XML to understand limits of
learnability. Our contributions are an XML Schema compatible lexical datatype
system to abstract content in XML and an algorithm to learn visibly pushdown
automata (VPA) directly from a set of examples. The proposed algorithm does not
require the tree representation of XML, so it can process large documents or
streams. The resulting deterministic VPA then allows stream validation of
documents to recognize deviations in the underlying tree structure or
datatypes.Comment: Paper accepted at First Int. Workshop on Emerging Cyberthreats and
Countermeasures ECTCM 201
Certain Query Answering on Compressed String Patterns: From Streams to Hyperstreams
International audienceWe study the problem of certain query answering (CQA) on compressed string patterns. These are incomplete singleton context-free grammars, that can model systems of multiple streams with references to others, called hyperstreams more recently. In order to capture regular path queries on strings, we consider nondeterministic finite automata (NFAs) for query definition. It turns out that CQA for Boolean NFA queries is equivalent to regular string pattern inclusion, i.e., whether all strings completing a compressed string pattern belong to a regular language. We prove that CQA on compressed string patterns is PSpace- complete for NFA queries. The PSpace-hardness even applies to Boolean queries defined by deterministic finite automata (DFAs) and without compression. We also show that CQA on compressed linear string patterns can be solved in PTime for DFA queries. The proofs of the results presented here can be found in the long version of this paper (https://hal.inria.fr/hal-01846016)
Streamability of nested word transductions
We consider the problem of evaluating in streaming (i.e., in a single
left-to-right pass) a nested word transduction with a limited amount of memory.
A transduction T is said to be height bounded memory (HBM) if it can be
evaluated with a memory that depends only on the size of T and on the height of
the input word. We show that it is decidable in coNPTime for a nested word
transduction defined by a visibly pushdown transducer (VPT), if it is HBM. In
this case, the required amount of memory may depend exponentially on the height
of the word. We exhibit a sufficient, decidable condition for a VPT to be
evaluated with a memory that depends quadratically on the height of the word.
This condition defines a class of transductions that strictly contains all
determinizable VPTs
Certain Query Answering on Compressed String Patterns: From Streams to Hyperstreams (long version)
We study the problem of certain query answering (CQA) on compressed string patterns. These are incomplete singleton context-free grammars, that can model systems of multiple streams with references to others, called hyperstreams more recently. In order to capture regular path queries on strings, we consider nondeterministic finite automata (NFAs) for query definition. It turns out that CQA for Boolean NFA queries is equivalent to regular string pattern inclusion, i.e., whether all strings completing a compressed string pattern belong to a regular language. We prove that CQA on compressed string patterns is PSPACE-complete for NFA queries. The PSPACE-hardness even applies to Boolean queries defined by deterministic finite automata (DFAs) and without compression. We also show that CQA on compressed linear string patterns can be solved in PTIME for DFA queries
Two-Way Visibly Pushdown Automata and Transducers
Automata-logic connections are pillars of the theory of regular languages.
Such connections are harder to obtain for transducers, but important results
have been obtained recently for word-to-word transformations, showing that the
three following models are equivalent: deterministic two-way transducers,
monadic second-order (MSO) transducers, and deterministic one-way automata
equipped with a finite number of registers. Nested words are words with a
nesting structure, allowing to model unranked trees as their depth-first-search
linearisations. In this paper, we consider transformations from nested words to
words, allowing in particular to produce unranked trees if output words have a
nesting structure. The model of visibly pushdown transducers allows to describe
such transformations, and we propose a simple deterministic extension of this
model with two-way moves that has the following properties: i) it is a simple
computational model, that naturally has a good evaluation complexity; ii) it is
expressive: it subsumes nested word-to-word MSO transducers, and the exact
expressiveness of MSO transducers is recovered using a simple syntactic
restriction; iii) it has good algorithmic/closure properties: the model is
closed under composition with a unambiguous one-way letter-to-letter transducer
which gives closure under regular look-around, and has a decidable equivalence
problem
Synchronizing automata over nested words
We extend the concept of a synchronizing word from deterministic finite-state automata (DFA) to nested word automata (NWA): A well-matched nested word is called synchronizing if it resets the control state of any configuration, i. e., takes the NWA from all control states to a single control state.
We show that although the shortest synchronizing word for an NWA, if it exists, can be (at most) exponential in the size of the NWA, the existence of such a word can still be decided in polynomial time. As our main contribution, we show that deciding the existence of a short synchronizing word (of at most given length) becomes PSPACE-complete (as opposed to NP-complete for DFA). The upper bound
makes a connection to pebble games and Strahler numbers, and the lower bound goes via small-cost synchronizing words for DFA, an intermediate problem that we also show PSPACE-complete. We also characterize the complexity of a number of related problems, using the observation that the intersection nonemptiness problem for NWA
is EXP-complete
Which DTDs are streaming bounded repairable?
ABSTRACT Integrity constraint management concerns both checking whether data is valid and taking action to restore correctness when invalid data is discovered. In XML the notion of valid data can be captured by schema languages such as Document Type Definitions (DTDs) and more generally XML schemas. DTDs have the property that constraint checking can be done in streaming fashion. In this paper we consider when the corresponding action to restore validity -repair -can be done in streaming fashion. We formalize this as the problem of determining, given a DTD, whether or not a streaming procedure exists that transforms an input document so as to satisfy the DTD, using a number of edits independent of the document. We show that this problem is decidable. In fact, we show the decidability of a more general problem, allowing a more general class of schemas than DTDs, and requiring a repair procedure that works only for documents that are already known to satisfy another class of constraints. The decision procedure relies on a new analysis of the structure of DTDs, reducing to a novel notion of game played on pushdown systems associated with the schemas
A Bit of Nondeterminism Makes Pushdown Automata Expressive and Succinct
We study the expressiveness and succinctness of good-for-games pushdown automata (GFG-PDA) over finite words, that is, pushdown automata whose nondeterminism can be resolved based on the run constructed so far, but independently of the remainder of the input word. We prove that GFG-PDA recognise more languages than deterministic PDA (DPDA) but not all context-free languages (CFL). This class is orthogonal to unambiguous CFL. We further show that GFG-PDA can be exponentially more succinct than DPDA, while PDA can be double-exponentially more succinct than GFG-PDA. We also study GFGness in visibly pushdown automata (VPA), which enjoy better closure properties than PDA, and for which we show GFGness to be EXPTIME-complete. GFG-VPA can be exponentially more succinct than deterministic VPA, while VPA can be exponentially more succinct than GFG-VPA. Both of these lower bounds are tight. Finally, we study the complexity of resolving nondeterminism in GFG-PDA. Every GFG-PDA has a positional resolver, a function that resolves nondeterminism and that is only dependant on the current configuration. Pushdown transducers are sufficient to implement the resolvers of GFG-VPA, but not those of GFG-PDA. GFG-PDA with finite-state resolvers are determinisable