Under construction
This research is up till now captured in a few papers. Two quotes
from some of the abstracts:
[1] Detecting illegal resource access in the setting of grid
computing is similar to the problem of virus detection as put
forward by Fred Cohen in 1984
(Comput. Secur. 6(1), 22-35, 1984).
We discuss Cohen's impossibility
result on virus detection, and introduce "risk assessment of
security hazards", a notion that is decidable for a large class
of program behaviors.
Keywords: Malcode, Program algebra, Thread algebra, Virus, Worm.
[2] Threads as contained in a thread algebra are used for the
modeling of sequential program behavior. A thread that may use
a counter to control its execution is called a one-counter
thread. In this paper the decidability of risk assessment (a
certain form of action forecasting) for one-counter threads is
proved. This relates to Cohen's impossibility result on virus
detection (Comput. Secur. 6(1), 22-35, 1984). Our decidability
result follows from a general property of the traces of
one-counter threads: if a state is reachable from some initial
state, then it is also reachable along a path in which all
counter values stay below a fixed bound that depends only on the
initial and final counter value. A further consequence is that
the reachability of a state is decidable. These properties are
based on a result for ω-one counter machines by Rosier and Yen
(SIAM J. Comput. 16(5), 779-807, 1987).
Keywords: One-counter systems, Thread algebra, Reachability,
Risk assessment.
References:
[1] J.A. Bergstra and A. Ponse. A bypass of Cohen's impossibility
result (PDF).
In P.M.A. Sloot, A.G. Hoekstra, T. Priol, A.
Reinefeld, M. Bubak (editors). Advances in Grid Computing - EGC
2005, LNCS 3470, pages 1097-1106. Springer-Verlag, 2005. Also
appeared as Electronic report
PRG0501,
Programming Research Group, University of Amsterdam, 2005.
[2] A. Ponse and M.B. van der Zwaag. Risk assessment for one-counter threads (PDF). Theory of Computing Systems, 43:563-582, 2008. A nice review by Roberto Bruni is available here (at MathSciNet).
To be completed: Dutch NOAG-ict page.