[cap-talk] Announcing Authodox version 0.1, first public release

[Toby Murray]

Announcing the first public release of Authodox.

Authodox is an experimental tool for modelling and detecting excess
authority in systems of interacting objects. It uses the CSP process
algebra and its model checker, FDR (now freely available for academic
and research purposes [1]), to achieve this.

Authodox differs from previous tools such as SCOLLAR [2] for the
automatic detection of excess authority in models of systems because it
is able to reason about causation, as well as acquirable permission.
Authodox is able to distinguish different kinds of causation, including
positive causation (in which the occurrence of events cause others to
occur) and negative causation (in which the occurrence of events cause
others to not occur).

Authodox may be downloaded from:
http://web.comlab.ox.ac.uk/oucl/work/toby.murray/tools/authodox/

To get a feel for Authodox, have a look at the screenshot heavy
introductory tutorial that walks through the process of modelling and
detecting excess authority in a small but illustrative scenario.
http://web.comlab.ox.ac.uk/oucl/work/toby.murray/tools/authodox/doc/index.html#authodox-tutorial


Quoting from the current README:
 
Requirements
------------

In order to run Authodox, you'll need the following installed:

  - FDR2 (known to work with versions 2.82 - 2.83),

  - Python 2.4 or later,

  - GTK 2.6 or later,

  - PyGTK 2.6 or later.


The following are also recommended as functionality is reduced in their
absence:

  - GraphViz (known to work with version 2.6).


Installing FDR
--------------

The most recent version of FDR (2.83) is now
available to download at no charge for academic teaching and research
purposes. It is being offered in binary-only form and is available at
http://www.fsel.com/fdr2_download.html.

Binaries are available for Solaris (SPARC), Linux (x86) and OSX
(x86 / PowerPC Universal Binary). To install FDR, download the
appropriate binary. Unpack it to a suitable directory and set the
FDRHOME environment variable to point to the location in which FDR was
unpacked.

For example, the following commands successfully install FDR for use by
Authodox on the author's Linux system.

     # download the Linux binary
     wget http://www.fsel.com/download/fdr-2.83-linux-academic.tar.gz
     # extract the binary; creates the directory fdr-2.83-linux-academic
     tar -xzf fdr-2.83-linux-academic.tar.gz
     # set the FDRHOME environemnt variable appropriately
     export FDRHOME=$PWD/fdr-2.83-linux-academic


Installing and Running Authodox
-------------------------------

   To install Authodox, complete the following.

    1. Unpack the archive to a local directory in which Authodox is to
       be installed.
    2. Set the AUTHODOXHOME environment variable to point to this
       directory.
    3. If it is not set already, set the FDRHOME environment variable
       to point to the directory in which FDR has been installed.


   To run Authodox, execute the following command.

   ${AUTHODOXHOME}/src/dox.py

Documentation
-------------

   Authodox contains on-line documentation. To view it, select the
   "Contents" item from the "Help" menu.


Cheers,
Toby

[1] FDR now freely available for academic and research purposes from
http://www.fsel.com/fdr2_download.html

[2] SCOLLAR: http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/rr2005-12.pdf