Risk Assessment for One-Counter Threads
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 threa...
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Published in | Theory of computing systems Vol. 43; no. 3-4; pp. 563 - 582 |
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Main Authors | , |
Format | Journal Article |
Language | English |
Published |
New York
Springer-Verlag
01.12.2008
Springer Nature B.V |
Subjects | |
Online Access | Get full text |
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Summary: | 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
). |
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Bibliography: | ObjectType-Article-1 SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1 ObjectType-Feature-2 content type line 23 |
ISSN: | 1432-4350 1433-0490 |
DOI: | 10.1007/s00224-007-9034-5 |