Strongly Normalizing Audited Computation

Abstract

Auditing is an increasingly important operation for computer programming, for example in security (e.g. to enable history-based access control) and to enable reproducibility and accountability (e.g. provenance in scientific programming). Most proposed auditing techniques are ad hoc or treat auditing as a second-class, extralinguistic operation; logical or semantic foundations for auditing are not yet well-established. Justification Logic (JL) offers one such foundation; Bavera and Bonelli introduced a computational interpretation of JL called $\lambda^h$ that supports auditing. However, $\lambda^h$ is technically complex and strong normalization was only established for special cases. In addition, we show that the equational theory of $\lambda^h$ is inconsistent. We introduce a new calculus $\lambda^{hc}$ that is simpler than $\lambda^h$, consistent, and strongly normalizing. Our proof of strong normalization is formalized in Nominal Isabelle.