Preservation of epistemic properties in security protocol implementations

  • Authors:
  • Ron van der Meyden;Thomas Wilke

  • Affiliations:
  • University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia;Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel, Kiel, Germany

  • Venue:
  • TARK '07 Proceedings of the 11th conference on Theoretical aspects of rationality and knowledge
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

We introduce (i) a general class of security protocols with private channel as cryptographic primitive and (ii) a probabilistic epistemic logic to express properties of security protocols. Our main theorem says that when a property expressed in our logic holds for an ideal protocol (where "ideal" means that the private channel hides everything), then it also holds when the private channel is implemented using an encryption scheme that guarantees perfect secrecy (in the sense of Shannon). Our class of protocols contains, for instance, an oblivious transfer protocol by Rivest and Chaum's solution to the dining cryptographers problem. In our logic we can express fundamental security properties of these protocols. The proof of the main theorem is based on a notion of refinement for probabilistic Kripke structures.