This paper contributes a feedback operator, in the form of a monoidal trace, to the theory of coalgebraic, state-based modelling of components. The feedback operator on components is shown to satisfy the trace axioms of Joyal, Street and Verity. We employ McCurdy's tube diagrams, which are an extension of standard string diagrams for monoidal categories, to represent and manipulate component diagrams. The microcosm principle then yields a canonical ‘inner’ traced monoidal structure on the category of resumptions (elements of final coalgebras/components). This generalises an observation by Abramsky, Haghverdi and Scott.

Information flow policies are confidentiality policies that control information leakage through program execution. A common way to enforce secure information flow is through information flow type systems. Although type systems are compositional and usually enjoy decidable type checking or inference, their extensibility is very poor: type systems need to be redefined and proved sound for each new variation of security policy and programming language for which secure information flow verification is desired.

In contrast, program logics offer a general mechanism for enforcing a variety of safety policies, and for this reason are favoured in Proof Carrying Code, which is a promising security architecture for mobile code. However, the encoding of information flow policies in program logics is not straightforward because they refer to a relation between two program executions.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate logical formulations of secure information flow based on the idea of self-composition, which reduces the problem of secure information flow of a program P to a safety property for a program derived from P by composing P with a renaming of itself. Self-composition enables the use of standard techniques for information flow policy verification, such as program logics and model checking, that are suitable in Proof Carrying Code infrastructures.

We illustrate the applicability of self-composition in several settings, including different security policies such as non-interference and controlled forms of declassification, and programming languages including an imperative language with parallel composition, a non-deterministic language and, finally, a language with shared mutable data structures.

Noether classes of posets arise in a natural way from the constructively meaningful variants of the notion of a Noetherian ring. Using an axiomatic characterisation of a Noether class, we prove that if a poset belongs to a Noether class, then so does the poset of the finite descending chains. When applied to the poset of finitely generated ideals of a ring, this helps towards a unified constructive proof of the Hilbert basis theorem for all Noether classes.

Whereas Alan Day showed that the continuous lattices are the algebras of a filter monad on Set, we employ the theory of lax algebras (as developed by Barr, Pisani, Clementino, Hofmann, Tholen, Seal and others) to broaden this characterisation to a description of the wider class of continuous dcpos as algebras of a lax filter monad. Building on an axiomatisation of topological spaces through convergence as lax algebras of a lax extension of the filter monad to a category of relations, we show that those topological spaces whose associated lax algebra is in fact a strict algebra are what M. Erné called the C-spaces. The sober C-spaces are precisely the continuous dcpos under the Scott topology, and we discuss how the possibly little-known C-spaces, which have been studied by B. Banaschewski, J. D. Lawson, R.-E. Hoffmann, M. Erné and G. Wilke, very directly capture an essential topological notion of approximation inherent in the continuous dcpos, and hence provide a natural topological concept of domain.

The purpose of this paper is to develop the basic theory of stably compact spaces (viz. compact, locally compact, coherent sober spaces) and introduce in an accessible manner and with a minimum of prerequisites some significant new lines of investigation and application arising from recent research, which has arisen primarily in the theoretical computer science community. Three primary themes have developed:

1. (i) the property of stable compactness is preserved under a large variety of constructions involving powerdomains, hyperspaces and function spaces;

2. (ii) the underlying de Groot duality of stably compact spaces, which finds varied expression, is reflected by duality theorems involving the just mentioned constructions; and

3. (iii) the notion of inner and outer pavings is a useful and natural tool for such studies of stably compact spaces.

Bernstein coefficients provide a discrete approximation of the behaviour of a polynomial inside an interval. This can be used, for example, to isolate the real roots of polynomials. We prove formally a criterion for the existence of a single root in an interval and the correctness of the de Casteljau algorithm for computing Bernstein coefficients efficiently.

Final coalgebras capture system behaviours such as streams, infinite trees and processes. Algebraic operations on a final coalgebra can be defined by distributive laws (of a syntax functor Σ over a behaviour functor F). Such distributive laws correspond to abstract specification formats. One such format is a generalisation of the GSOS rules known from structural operational semantics of processes. We show that given an abstract GSOS specification ρ that defines operations σ on a final F-coalgebra, we can systematically construct a GSOS specification ρ that defines the pointwise extension σ of σ on a final FA-coalgebra. The construction relies on the addition of a family of auxiliary ‘buffer’ operations to the syntax. These buffer operations depend only on A, so the construction is uniform for all σ and F.

This paper explores a three dimensional characterisation of a declassification-based non-interference policy and its consequences. Two of the dimensions consist of specifying:

1. (a) the power of the attacker, that is, what public information a program has that an attacker can observe; and

2. (b) what secret information a program has that needs to be protected.

1. (c) the choice of program semantics, for example, trace semantics or denotational semantics, or any semantics in Cousot's semantics hierarchy.

Provenance is information recording the source, derivation or history of some information. Provenance tracking has been studied in a variety of settings, particularly database management systems. However, although many candidate definitions of provenance have been proposed, the mathematical or semantic foundations of data provenance have received comparatively little attention. In this paper, we argue that dependency analysis techniques familiar from program analysis and program slicing provide a formal foundation for forms of provenance that are intended to show how (part of) the output of a query depends on (parts of) its input. We introduce a semantic characterisation of such dependency provenance for a core database query language, show that minimal dependency provenance is not computable, and provide dynamic and static approximation techniques. We also discuss preliminary implementation experience with using dependency provenance to compute data slices, or summaries of the parts of the input relevant to a given part of the output.

We study equational presentations of functors and monads defined on a category that is equipped by an adjunction F ˧ U : → of descent type. We present a class of functors/monads that admit such an equational presentation that involves finitary signatures in .

We apply these results to an equational description of functors arising in various areas of theoretical computer science.

We describe some formal topological results, formalised in Matita 1/2, presented in predicative intuitionistic logic and in terms of Overlap Algebras.

Overlap Algebras are new algebraic structures designed to ease reasoning about subsets in an algebraic way within intuitionistic logic. We find that they also ease the formalisation of formal topological results in an interactive theorem prover.

Our main result is the existence of a functor between two categories of ‘generalised topological spaces’, one with points (Basic Pairs) and the other point-free (Basic Topologies). This formalisation is part of a wider scientific collaboration with the inventor of the theory, Giovanni Sambin. His goal is to verify in what sense his theory is ‘implementable’, and to discover what problems may arise in the process. We check that all intermediate constructions respect the stringent size requirements imposed by predicative logic. The formalisation is quite unusual, since it has to make explicit size information that is often hidden.

We found that the version of Matita used for the formalisation was largely inappropriate. The formalisation drove several major improvements of Matita that will be integrated in the next major release (Matita 1.0). We show some motivating examples, taken directly from the formalisation, for these improvements. We also describe a possibly sub-optimal solution in Matita 1/2, which is exploitable in other similar systems. We briefly discuss a better solution available in Matita 1.0.

The introduction of first-class type classes in the Coq system calls for a re-examination of the basic interfaces used for mathematical formalisation in type theory. We present a new set of type classes for mathematics and take full advantage of their unique features to make practical a particularly flexible approach that was formerly thought to be unfeasible. Thus, we address traditional proof engineering challenges as well as new ones resulting from our ambition to build upon this development a library of constructive analysis in which any abstraction penalties inhibiting efficient computation are reduced to a minimum.

The basis of our development consists of type classes representing a standard algebraic hierarchy, as well as portions of category theory and universal algebra. On this foundation, we build a set of mathematically sound abstract interfaces for different kinds of numbers, succinctly expressed using categorical language and universal algebra constructions. Strategic use of type classes lets us support these high-level theory-friendly definitions, while still enabling efficient implementations unhindered by gratuitous indirection, conversion or projection.

Algebra thrives on the interplay between syntax and semantics. The Prolog-like abilities of type class instance resolution allow us to conveniently define a quote function, thus facilitating the use of reflective techniques.

Given a program, a quotient can be obtained from it by deleting zero or more statements. The field of program slicing is concerned with computing a quotient of a program that preserves part of the behaviour of the original program. All program slicing algorithms take account of the structural properties of a program, such as control dependence and data dependence, rather than the semantics of its functions and predicates, and thus work, in effect, with program schemas. The dynamic slicing criterion of Korel and Laski requires only that program behaviour is preserved in cases where the original program follows a particular path, and that the slice/quotient follows this path. In this paper we formalise Korel and Laski's definition of a dynamic slice as applied to linear schemas, and also formulate a less restrictive definition in which the path through the original program need not be preserved by the slice. The less restrictive definition has the benefit of leading to smaller slices. For both definitions, we compute complexity bounds for the problems of establishing whether a given slice of a linear schema is a dynamic slice and whether a linear schema has a non-trivial dynamic slice, and prove that the latter problem is NP-hard in both cases. We also give an example to prove that minimal dynamic slices (whether or not they preserve the original path) need not be unique.

We fix a logical connection (Stone ˧ Pred : Setop → BA given by 2 as a schizophrenic object) and study coalgebraic modal logic that is induced by a functor T: Set → Set that is finitary and standard and preserves weak pullbacks and finite sets. We prove that for any such T, the cover modality nabla is a left (and its dual delta is a right) adjoint relative to ω. We then consider monotone unary modalities arising from the logical connection and show that they all are left (or right) adjoints relative to ω.