Automata for Hyperlanguages

Hyperproperties lift conventional trace properties from a set of execution traces to a set of sets of execution traces. Hyperproperties have been shown to be a powerful formalism for expressing and reasoning about information-flow security policies and important properties of cyber-physical systems such as sensitivity and robustness, as well as consistency conditions in distributed computing such as linearizability. Although there is an extensive body of work on automata-based representation of trace properties, we currently lack such characterization for hyperproperties. We introduce hyperautomata for em hyperlanguages, which are languages over sets of words. Essentially, hyperautomata allow running multiple quantified words over an automaton. We propose a specific type of hyperautomata called nondeterministic finite hyperautomata (NFH), which accept regular hyperlanguages. We demonstrate the ability of regular hyperlanguages to express hyperproperties for finite traces. We then explore the fundamental properties of NFH and show their closure under the Boolean operations. We show that while nonemptiness is undecidable in general, it is decidable for several fragments of NFH. We further show the decidability of the membership problem for finite sets and regular languages for NFH, as well as the containment problem for several fragments of NFH. Finally, we introduce learning algorithms based on Angluin's L-star algorithm for the fragments NFH in which the quantification is either strictly universal or strictly existential.