A Logical Approach to Security in the Context of Ambient Calculus

Abstract

In this paper 2 we advocate the use of a CTL* logic, built upon Ambient Calculus to analyze security properties. Our logic is a more expressive alternative to Ambient Logic, based on a single modality, but still powerful enough to handle mobility and dynamic hierarchies of locations. Moreover, having a temporal logic to express properties of computation, we can reuse the algorithms for model checking temporal logics in analyzing models for security problems. We resort to syntax trees of Ambient Calculus and enrich them with some labeling functions in order to obtain what we called labeled syntax trees. The labeled syntax trees will be used as possible worlds in a Kripke structure developed for a propositional branching temporal logic. The accessibility relation is generated by the reduction of Ambient Calculus considered as reduction between syntax trees. Providing the algorithms for calculating the accessibility relation between states, we open the perspective of model checking Ambient Calculus by using our algorithms together with the algorithms for model checking temporal logic.