New advances in H∞ control and filtering for nonlinear systems

The main objective of this special issue is to summarise recent advances in H∞ control and filtering for nonlinear systems, including time-delay, hybrid and stochastic systems. The published papers provide new ideas and approaches, clearly indicating the advances made in problem statements, methodologies or applications with respect to the existing results. The special issue also includes papers focusing on advanced and non-traditional methods and presenting considerable novelties in theoretical background or experimental setup. Some papers present applications to newly emerging fields, such as network-based control and estimation

Strong and Provably Secure Database Access Control

Existing SQL access control mechanisms are extremely limited. Attackers can leak information and escalate their privileges using advanced database features such as views, triggers, and integrity constraints. This is not merely a problem of vendors lagging behind the state-of-the-art. The theoretical foundations for database security lack adequate security definitions and a realistic attacker model, both of which are needed to evaluate the security of modern databases. We address these issues and present a provably secure access control mechanism that prevents attacks that defeat popular SQL database systems.Comment: A short version of this paper has been published in the proceedings of the 1st IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy (EuroS&P 2016

Securing Databases from Probabilistic Inference

Databases can leak confidential information when users combine query results with probabilistic data dependencies and prior knowledge. Current research offers mechanisms that either handle a limited class of dependencies or lack tractable enforcement algorithms. We propose a foundation for Database Inference Control based on ProbLog, a probabilistic logic programming language. We leverage this foundation to develop Angerona, a provably secure enforcement mechanism that prevents information leakage in the presence of probabilistic dependencies. We then provide a tractable inference algorithm for a practically relevant fragment of ProbLog. We empirically evaluate Angerona's performance showing that it scales to relevant security-critical problems.Comment: A short version of this paper has been accepted at the 30th IEEE Computer Security Foundations Symposium (CSF 2017

Middle-Out Reasoning for Logic Program Synthesis

We propose a novel approach to automating the synthesis of logic programs: Logic programs are synthesized as a by-product of the planning of a verification proof. The approach is a two-level one: At the object level, we prove program verification conjectures in a sorted, first-order theory. The conjectures are of the form 8args \Gamma\Gamma\Gamma\Gamma! : prog(args \Gamma\Gamma\Gamma\Gamma! ) $ spec(args \Gamma\Gamma\Gamma\Gamma! ). At the meta-level, we plan the object-level verification with an unspecified program definition. The definition is represented with a (second-order) meta-level variable, which becomes instantiated in the course of the planning

Access Control Synthesis for Physical Spaces

Access-control requirements for physical spaces, like office buildings and airports, are best formulated from a global viewpoint in terms of system-wide requirements. For example, "there is an authorized path to exit the building from every room." In contrast, individual access-control components, such as doors and turnstiles, can only enforce local policies, specifying when the component may open. In practice, the gap between the system-wide, global requirements and the many local policies is bridged manually, which is tedious, error-prone, and scales poorly. We propose a framework to automatically synthesize local access control policies from a set of global requirements for physical spaces. Our framework consists of an expressive language to specify both global requirements and physical spaces, and an algorithm for synthesizing local, attribute-based policies from the global specification. We empirically demonstrate the framework's effectiveness on three substantial case studies. The studies demonstrate that access control synthesis is practical even for complex physical spaces, such as airports, with many interrelated security requirements

Runtime Verification of Temporal Properties over Out-of-order Data Streams

We present a monitoring approach for verifying systems at runtime. Our approach targets systems whose components communicate with the monitors over unreliable channels, where messages can be delayed or lost. In contrast to prior works, whose property specification languages are limited to propositional temporal logics, our approach handles an extension of the real-time logic MTL with freeze quantifiers for reasoning about data values. We present its underlying theory based on a new three-valued semantics that is well suited to soundly and completely reason online about event streams in the presence of message delay or loss. We also evaluate our approach experimentally. Our prototype implementation processes hundreds of events per second in settings where messages are received out of order.Comment: long version of the CAV 2017 pape

A Framework for Program Development Based on Schematic Proof

Often, calculi for manipulating and reasoning about programs can be recast as calculi for synthesizing programs. The difference involves often only a slight shift of perspective: admitting metavariables into proofs. We propose that such calculi should be implemented in logical frameworks that support this kind of proof construction and that such an implementation can unify program verification and synthesis. Our proposal is illustrated with a worked example developed in Paulson's Isabelle system. We also give examples of existent calculi that are closely related to the methodology we are proposing and others that can be profitably recast using our approach