Decidability of freshness, undecidability of revelation

Abstract

We study decidability of a logic for describing processes with restricted names. We choose a minimal fragment of the Ambient Logic, but the techniques we present should apply to every logic which uses Cardelli and Gordon revelation and hiding operators, and Gabbay and Pitts freshness quantifier. We start from the static fragment of ambient logic that Calcagno, Cardelli and Gordon proved to be decidable. We prove that the addition of a hiding quantifier makes the logic undecidable. Hiding can be decomposed as freshness plus revelation. Quite surprisingly, freshness alone is decidable, but revelation alone is not. © Springer-Verlag 2004.