Abstract
Motivated by recent applications of pushdown systems to computer security problems, we present an efficient algorithm for the reachability problem of alternating pushdown systems. Although the algorithm is exponential, a careful analysis reveals that the exponent is usually small in typical applications. We show that the algorithm can be used to compute winning regions in pushdown games. In a second contribution, we observe that the algorithm runs in polynomial time for a certain subproblem, and show that the computation of certificate chains with threshold certificates in the SPKI/SDSI authorization framework can be reduced to this subproblem. We present a detailed complexity analysis of the algorithm and its application, and report on experimental results obtained with a prototype implementation.
This work was partially supported by the DFG project Algorithms for Software Model Checking and SFB 627 Nexus, Project A6.
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Suwimonteerabuth, D., Schwoon, S., Esparza, J. (2006). Efficient Algorithms for Alternating Pushdown Systems with an Application to the Computation of Certificate Chains. In: Graf, S., Zhang, W. (eds) Automated Technology for Verification and Analysis. ATVA 2006. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4218. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11901914_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11901914_13
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