Managing Software Uninstall with Negative Trust

Abstract : A problematic aspect of software management systems in view of integrity preservation is the handling, approval, tracking and eventual execution of change requests. In the context of the relation between clients and repositories, trust can help identifying all packages required by the intended installation. Negative trust, in turn, can be used to approach the complementary problem induced by removing packages. In this paper we offer a logic for negative trust which allows to identify admissible and no-longer admissible software packages in the current installation profile in view of uninstall processes. We provide a simple working example and the system is formally verified using the Coq theorem prover.