Tagged Systems: A Framework for the Specification of History-dependent Properties

Abstract

We propose a general method for the treatment of history-dependent runtime errors. When one has to control this kind of errors, a tagged version of the language is usually defined, in which tags capture only the necessary information of the history of processes. We will characterize such tagged languages as being quotients of the reachability tree defined by the computations of the original language. From this fact we can conclude that the property characterized by each tagged language is indeed a property of the original one. In this way, we can work in a common framework, instead of defining an ad hoc semantics for each property. In particular, we could still use the analysis machinery existing in the calculus in order to prove that or other related properties. We have applied this methodology to the study of resource access control in a distributed π-calculus, called Dπ. In particular, we have proved that the tagged version of Dπ is indeed a tagging according to our definition.