Cryptographic Protocol Composition via the Authentication Tests

  • Authors:
  • Joshua D. Guttman

  • Affiliations:
  • The MITRE Corporation,

  • Venue:
  • FOSSACS '09 Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Foundations of Software Science and Computational Structures: Held as Part of the Joint European Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software, ETAPS 2009
  • Year:
  • 2009

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

Although cryptographic protocols are typically analyzed in isolation, they are used in combinations. If a protocol *** 1 , when analyzed alone, was shown to meet some security goals, will it still meet those goals when executed together with a second protocol *** 2 ? Not necessarily: for every *** 1 , some *** 2 s undermine its goals. We use the strand space "authentication test" principles to suggest a criterion to ensure a *** 2 preserves *** 1 's goals; this criterion strengthens previous proposals. Security goals for *** 1 are expressed in a language $\mathcal{L}$(*** 1 ) in classical logic. Strand spaces provide the models for $\mathcal{L}$(*** 1 ). Certain homomorphisms among models for $\mathcal{L}$(*** ) preserve the truth of the security goals. This gives a way to extract--from a counterexample to a goal that uses both protocols--a counterexample using only the first protocol. This model-theoretic technique, using homomorphisms among models to prove results about a syntactically defined set of formulas, appears to be novel for protocol analysis.