Abstract There is an explosion in the number of ontologies and semantic artefacts being produced in science. This paper discusses the need for common platforms to receive, host, serve, align, and enable their reuse. Ontology repositories and semantic artefact catalogues are necessary to address this need and to make ontologies FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable). The OntoPortal Alliance ( https://ontoportal.org ) is a consortium of research and infrastructure teams dedicated to promoting the development of such repositories based on the open, collaboratively developed OntoPortal software. We present the OntoPortal technology as a generic resource to build ontology repositories and semantic artefact catalogues that can support resources ranging from SKOS thesauri to OBO, RDF-S, and OWL ontologies. The paper reviews the features of OntoPortal and presents the current and forthcoming public and open repositories built with the technology maintained by the Alliance.

This paper presents an intrusion detection methodology based on the concept of noninterference for detecting race-condition attacks. In general, this type of attack occurs when an unprivileged process causes a privileged process to perform illegal operations by executing strategic operations in the appropriate timing window. We apply the noninterference model in a novel way that allows us to formally represent valid interleaving between privileged and unprivileged processes. Instead of proving a system satisfies noninterference assertions, we derive an algorithm for checking the assertions at run-time based on the developed theory and a formal model of Unix system calls. Our methodology can detect unknown race-condition attacks. In addition, this work provides an example of the application of formal specification and reasoning in intrusion detection.

A framework is given for describing information and information flow. The authors show that information can be represented as a lattice. They motivate the idea that this framework is applicable for demonstrating security properties of systems. In particular, they show the relationship between the lattice representing information and the unwinding theorem. They also demonstrate the relationship between properties of this lattice and the aggregation problem.>

The authors present an abstract framework for composing models of system components. The abstract presentation is designed to be applicable to a very wide range of models of computation. They introduce a restricted model of computation and develop techniques that are useful for composing security models for modular systems. They include a small example of a composed security model.>

The LOCK definition of non-interference and the LOCK unwinding theorem provide a method of using a non-interference model in a system with an identified potential for interference. However, the LOCK work is presented in terms specific to the LOCK system. The authors generalize the LOCK definitions and theorems so that they could be used in systems other than LOCK that have specifically identified potentials for interference They state and prove a general winding theorem for this purpose. They also show that the LOCK unwinding theorem follows from their general unwinding theorem.>

A state machine model is introduced for trusted processes. It makes explicit use of the notion of locking part of the state space in order to allow privileged actions to overlap. The model controls the interaction between overlapping actions by restricting the events that can change the locks, using the locks to restrict which events can change which parts of the state space, and preventing the initiation of actions that would interfere with currently executing ones.>