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Model checking usage policies†

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 November 2014

MASSIMO BARTOLETTI ,
PIERPAOLO DEGANO ,
GIAN LUIGI FERRARI  and
ROBERTO ZUNINO
MASSIMO BARTOLETTI
Affiliation:
Dipartimento di Matematica e Informatica, Università degli Studi di Cagliari, via Ospedale 72, 09124 Cagliari, Italy Email: bart@unica.it
PIERPAOLO DEGANO
Affiliation:
Dipartimento di Informatica, Università di Pisa, Italy
GIAN LUIGI FERRARI
Affiliation:
Dipartimento di Informatica, Università di Pisa, Italy
ROBERTO ZUNINO
Affiliation:
DISI, Università di Trento and COSBI, Italy
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Abstract

We study usage automata, a formal model for specifying policies on the usage of resources. Usage automata extend finite state automata with some additional features, parameters and guards, that improve their expressivity. We show that usage automata are expressive enough to model policies of real-world applications. We discuss their expressive power, and we prove that the problem of telling whether a computation complies with a usage policy is decidable. The main contribution of this paper is a model checking technique for usage automata. The model is that of usages, i.e. basic processes that describe the possible patterns of resource access and creation. In spite of the model having infinite states, because of recursion and resource creation, we devise a polynomial-time model checking technique for deciding when a usage complies with a usage policy.

Type
Special Issue: Objects and Services
Information
Mathematical Structures in Computer Science , Volume 25 , Issue 3 , March 2015 , pp. 710 - 763
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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Footnotes

†

This work has been partially supported by EU under grant FP7-257414 (Project ASCENS), and by Aut. Region of Sardinia under grants L.R.7/2007 CRP2-120 (Project TESLA) and CRP-17285 (Project TRICS).

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