Abstract
Consider interaction of principals where each principal has its own policy and different principals may not trust each other. In one scenario the principals could be pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, biomedical labs and health related government institutions. In another scenario principals could be navy fleets of different and not necessarily friendly nations. In spite of the complexity of interaction, one may want to ensure that certain properties remain invariant. For example, in the navy scenario, each fleet should have enough information from other fleets to avoid unfortunate incidents. Furthermore, one wants to use automated provers to prove invariance. A natural approach to this and many other important problems is to provide a high-level logic-based language for the principals to communicate. We do just that. Three years ago two of us presented the first incarnation of Distributed Knowledge Authorization Language (DKAL). Here we present a new and much different incarnation of DKAL that we call Evidential DKAL. Statements communicated in Evidential DKAL are supposed to be accompanied with sufficient justifications. In general, we construe the term “authorization” in the acronym “DKAL” rather liberally; DKAL is essentially a general policy language. There is a wide spectrum of potential applications of KAL. One ambitious goal is to provide a framework for establishing and maintaining invariants.
Most fascinating is a feature that would make any journalist tremble. Tuyuca requires verb-endings on statements to show how the speaker knows something. Diga ape-wi means that the boy played soccer (I know because I saw him), while diga ape-hiyi means the boy played soccer (I assume). English can provide such information, but for Tuyuca that is an obligatory ending on the verb. Evidential languages force speakers to think hard about how they learned what they say they know.
—The Economist, January 1, 2010
To Bertrand Meyer, the Eiffel tower of program correctness.
* Blass was partially supported by NSF grant DMS-0653696. Part of the work reported here was performed during visits of Blass and Neeman to Microsoft.
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Blass, A., Gurevich, Y., Moskal, M., Neeman, I. (2011). Evidential Authorization*. In: Nanz, S. (eds) The Future of Software Engineering. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-15187-3_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-15187-3_5
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