A logic for SDSI's linked local name spaces: preliminary version

M. Abadi (1998) has introduced a logic to explicate the meaning of local names in SDSI, the simple distributed security infrastructure proposed by Rivest and Lampson. Abadi's logic does not correspond precisely to SDSI, however, it draws conclusions about local names that do not follow from SDSI's name resolution algorithm. Moreover its semantics is somewhat unintuitive. This paper presents the logic of local name containment, which does not suffer from these deficiencies. It has a clear semantics and provides a tight characterization of SDSI name resolution. The semantics is shown to be closely related to that of logic programs, leading to an approach to the efficient implementation of queries concerning local names. A complete axiomatization of the logic is also provided.