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Abstract

In the context of operating system protection mechanisms,safety refers to the ability to decide who can obtained certain rights to resources by some future sequence of command invocations. Harrison, Ruzzo and Ullman have shown that in general safety is undecidable. On the other hand Jones, Lipton and Snyder have analyzed a simple system is which safety is decidable in time linear in the size of the system. This paper presents a large class of operating system protection mechanisms for which a polynomial time decision procedure for the safety question can be given. Extensions are then exhibited that are P-space complete andNP-complete.

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Budd, T.A. Safety in grammatical protection systems. International Journal of Computer and Information Sciences 12, 413–431 (1983). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00977968

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00977968

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