A Hierarchy of Authentication Specifications

  • Authors:
  • Gavin Lowe

  • Affiliations:
  • -

  • Venue:
  • CSFW '97 Proceedings of the 10th IEEE workshop on Computer Security Foundations
  • Year:
  • 1997

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Abstract

Many security protocols have the aim of authenticating one agent to another. Yet there is no clear consensus in the academic literature about precisely what ``authentication'' means. In this paper we suggest that the appropriate authentication requirement will depend upon the use to which the protocol is put, and identify several possible definitions of ``authentication''. We formalize each definition using the process algebra CSP, use this formalism to study their relative strengths, and show how the model checker FDR can be used to test whether a system running the protocol meets such a specification.