Abstract
Opacity is an information flow property that captures the notion of plausible deniability in dynamic systems, that is whether an intruder can deduce that “secret” behavior has occurred. In this paper we provide a general framework of opacity to unify the many existing notions of opacity that exist for discrete event systems. We use this framework to discuss language-based and state-based notions of opacity over automata. We present several methods for language-based opacity verification, and a general approach to transform state-based notions into language-based ones. We demonstrate this approach for current-state and initial-state opacity, unifying existing results. We then investigate the notions of K-step opacity. We provide a language-based view of K-step opacity encompassing two existing notions and two new ones. We then analyze the corresponding language-based verification methods both formally and with numerical examples. In each case, the proposed methods offer significant reductions in runtime and space complexity.
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Notes
While Hep,2 could be designed to be deterministic, our nondeterministic Hep,2 offers reduced complexity.
The library is available at https://gitlab.eecs.umich.edu/M-DES-tools/desops/.
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The authors would like to thank the reviewers for their useful and very detailed comments. They were most helpful in improving the paper for clarity and precision.
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Guest Editors: Rong Su and Carlos Basilio
Research supported in part by US NSF under grants CNS-1738103, CNS-1801342, and ECCS-1553873.
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Wintenberg, A., Blischke, M., Lafortune, S. et al. A general language-based framework for specifying and verifying notions of opacity. Discrete Event Dyn Syst 32, 253–289 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10626-021-00357-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10626-021-00357-x