Security analysis of network protocols: logical and computational methods

  • Authors:
  • John C. Mitchell

  • Affiliations:
  • Stanford University, Stanford, CA

  • Venue:
  • PPDP '05 Proceedings of the 7th ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Principles and practice of declarative programming
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

Security analysis of network protocols is a rich scientific area with two different foundations, one based on logic and symbolic computation, and one based on computational complexity theory. The symbolic approach has led to formal logics and automated tools that have been used successfully in a number of case studies. The computational approach yields more insight into the strength and vulnerabilities of protocols, but it involves explicit reasoning about probability and computational complexity. Ideally, we would like to combine the advantages of both and develop a simple, automatable method that captures intuitive high-level reasoning principles, yet accurately reflects the subtleties of probabilistic polynomial-time computation. This talk will summarize some of the main lines of prior work and discuss ways to bridge the gap between symbolic and computational analysis. A significant portion of the talk will focus on a high-level protocol logic whose provable statements are correct when regarded as assertions about probabilistic polynomial-time protocol execution in the face of probabilistic polynomial-time attack.