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Abstract: This paper serves to bring three independent but important areas of computer science to a common meeting point: Formal Concept Analysis (FCA), Chu Spaces, and Domain Theory (DT). Each area is given a perspective or reformulation that is conducive to the flow of ideas and to the exploration of cross-disciplinary connections. Among other results, we show that the notion of states in Scott’s information system corresponds precisely to that of formal concepts in FCA with respect to all finite Chu spaces, and the entailment relation corresponds to “association rules”. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Language-based approaches to information security have led to the development of security type systems that permit the programmer to describe confidentiality policies on data. Security type systems are usually intended to enforce noninterference, a property that requires that high-security information not affect low-security computation. However, in practice, noninterference is often too restrictive—the desired policy does permit some information leakage. To compensate for the strictness of noninterference, practical approaches include some mechanism for declassifying high-security information. But such declassification is potentially dangerous, and its use should be restricted to prevent unintended information leaks. Zdancewic and Myers previously introduced the notion of robust declassification in an attempt to capture the desired restrictions on declassification, but that work did not propose a method for determining when a program satisfies the robust declassification condition. This paper motivates robust declassification and shows that a simple change to a security type system can enforce it. The idea is to extend the lattice of security labels to include integrity constraints as well as confidentiality constraints and then require that the decision to perform a declassification have high integrity. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: In this paper we use the concept of resource cumulation to model various forms of computation. The space of cumulations (called a cumulator) is simply represented as a five tuple consisting of a well-founded partial order, a monoid and a volume function. The volume function is introduced to simplify reasoning about limit points and other topological properties. A specification command is a set of cumulations. Typical phenomena of concurrency such as reactiveness, safety and liveness, fairness, real time and branching time naturally arise from the model. In order to support a programming theory, we introduce a specification language that incorporates sequentiality, nondeterminism, simple parallelism, negation and general recursions. A new fixpoint technique is used to model general recursions. The language is applied to the case study on CSP, which becomes a special model of cumulative computing with a combination of four resource cumulators of alphabet, termination, trace and refusal. All laws of cumulative computing are also valid for CSP and the generalization from CSP to Timed CSP can be achieved by simply combining the four cumulators with real time. Loops whose bodies may take zero time can then be modeled more satisfactorily. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]