Transducer-based analysis of cryptographic protocols

  • Authors:
  • Ralf Küsters;Thomas Wilke

  • Affiliations:
  • ETH Zurich, Institute of Theoretical Computer Science, IFW E 48.3, Haldeneggsteig 4, CH-8092 Zurich, Switzerland;Institut für Informatik und Praktische Mathematik, Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel, 24098 Kiel, Germany

  • Venue:
  • Information and Computation
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

Cryptographic protocols can be divided into (1) protocols where the protocol steps are simple from a computational point of view and can thus be modeled by simple means, for instance, by single rewrite rules-we call these protocols non-looping-and (2) protocols, such as group protocols, where the protocol steps are complex and typically involve an iterative or recursive computation-we call them recursive. While much is known on the decidability of security for non-looping protocols, only little is known for recursive protocols. In this paper, we prove decidability of security (with respect to the standard Dolev-Yao intruder) for a core class of recursive protocols and undecidability for several extensions. The key ingredient of our protocol model is specifically designed tree transducers which work over infinite signatures and have the ability to generate new constants (which allow us to mimic key generation). The decidability result is based on an automata-theoretic construction which involves a new notion of regularity, designed to work well with the infinite signatures we use.