Visualizing Game-Based Certificates for Hyperproperty Verification

2025-01-17

AI Summary

Certificates for hyperproperty verification—particularly for HyperLTL-expressible safety and information-flow properties—lack explainability and interactivity. Method: This paper pioneers modeling hyperproperty verification as a quantified game, using existential-player strategies as novel, verifiable, and human-understandable certificates. We develop a game-theoretic semantics for a HyperLTL fragment, enable automated strategy synthesis, and design HyGaViz—a web-based interactive visualization tool that supports user-guided exploration of universal traces to collaboratively validate strategy correctness. Contribution/Results: (1) We establish game strategies as an explainable certificate paradigm for hyperproperty verification; (2) we present the first visualization system supporting strategy-level explanation and human-in-the-loop verification; (3) we empirically validate its conciseness, checkability, and pedagogical utility across multiple information-flow security benchmarks.

Technology Category

• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Automated Reasoning and Theorem Proving
• Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization: Satisfiability Modulo Theories
• Reasoning under Uncertainty: Other Foundations of Reasoning under Uncertainty

Application Category

• Semantics and Knowledge: Data modeling to support human-machine intelligence, including LLMs agents, intelligent system behavior, explanations, and user-friendly interactions
• Security and Privacy: Data transparency and provenance
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Data quality aspects of human-annotated datasets

Abstract

Hyperproperties relate multiple executions of a system and are commonly used to specify security and information-flow policies. While many verification approaches for hyperproperties exist, providing a convincing certificate that the system satisfies a given property is still a major challenge. In this paper, we propose strategies as a suitable form of certificate for hyperproperties specified in a fragment of the temporal logic HyperLTL. Concretely, we interpret the verification of a HyperLTL property as a game between universal and existential quantification, allowing us to leverage strategies for the existential quantifiers as certificates. We present HyGaViz, a browser-based visualization tool that lets users interactively explore an (automatically synthesized) witness strategy by taking control over universally quantified executions.

Problem

• HyperLTL
• Game-based Proofs
• Information Flow Security

Innovation

• game-based proofs
• HyperLTL logic
• strategy-based verification