It is increasingly common to encounter time-varying random fields on networks (metabolic networks, sensor arrays, distributed computing, etc.). This paper considers the problem of optimal, nonlinear prediction of these fields, showing from an information-theoretic perspective that it is formally identical to the problem of finding minimal local sufficient statistics. I derive general properties...

Many condensed matter systems are such that their collective excitations at low energies can be described by fields satisfying equations of motion formally indistinguishable from those of relativistic field theory. The finite speed of propagation of the disturbances in the effective fields (in the simplest models, the speed of sound) plays here the role of the speed of light in fundamental phys...

Dynamic systems play a central role in fields such as planning, verification, and databases. Fragmented throughout these fields, we find a multitude of languages to formally specify dynamic systems and a multitude of systems to reason on such specifications. Often, such systems are bound to one specific language and one specific inference task. It is troublesome that performing several inferenc...

This notes explains how the Kosaraju’s algorithm that computes the strong-connected components of a directed graph has been formalised in the Coq prover using the SSReflect extension.

Cryptography relies on the secrecy of keys. Measures of information, and thus secrecy, are called entropy. Previous work does not formally assess the cryptographically appropriate entropy of secret keys. This report defines several new forms of entropy appropriate for cryptographic situations. This report defines statistical inference methods appropriate for assessing cryptographic entropy.

Severe low-level vulnerabilities abound in today’s computer systems, allowing cyber-attackers to remotely gain full control. This happens in big part because our programming languages, compilers, and architectures were designed in an era of scarce hardware resources and too often trade off security for efficiency. The semantics of mainstream low-level languages like C is inherently insecure, an...

The safety and security of software systems depends on how they are initially configured. Manually writing program code that establishes such an initial configuration is a tedious and error-prone engineering process. In this paper we present an automatic and formally verified initialiser for component-based systems built on the general-purpose microkernel seL4. The construction principles of th...