Safe Simplifying Transformations for Security Protocols or not just the Needham Schroeder Public Key Protocol

  • Authors:
  • Mei Lin Hui;Gavin Lowe

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-

  • Venue:
  • CSFW '99 Proceedings of the 12th IEEE workshop on Computer Security Foundations
  • Year:
  • 1999

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Abstract

Recent techniques for analyzing security protocols have tended to concentrate upon the small protocols that are typically found in the academic literature. However, there is a huge gulf between these and most large commercial protocols: the latter typically have many more fields, and much higher levels of nested encryption. As a result, existing techniques are difficult to apply directly to these large protocols. In this paper we develop the notion of safe simplifying transformations: transformations that have the property of preserving insecurities; the effect of such transformations is that if we can verify the transformed protocol, then we will have verified the original protocol. We identify a number of such safe simplifying transformations, and use them in the analysis of a commercial protocol.