Athena: a novel approach to efficient automatic security protocol analysis

  • Authors:
  • Dawn Xiaodong Song;Sergey Berezin;Adrian Perrig

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-;-

  • Venue:
  • Journal of Computer Security
  • Year:
  • 2001

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Abstract

We propose a new efficient automatic verification technique,Athena, for security protocol analysis. It uses a new efficientrepresentation - our extension to the Strand Space Model, andutilizes techniques from both model checking and theorem provingapproaches. Athena is fully automatic and is able to prove thecorrectness of many security protocols with arbitrary number ofconcurrent runs. The run time for a typical protocol from theliterature, like the Needham-Schroeder protocol, is often afraction of a second. Athena exploits several different techniques that enable it toanalyze infinite sets of protocol runs and achieve such efficiency.Our extended Strand Space Model is a natural and efficientrepresentation for the problem domain. The security properties arespecified in a simple logic which permits both efficient proofsearch algorithms and has enough expressive power to specifyinteresting properties. The automatic proof search procedureborrows some efficient techniques from both model checking andtheorem proving. We believe that it is the right combination of thenew compact representation and all the techniques that actuallymakes Athena successful in fast and automatic verification ofsecurity protocols.