Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI)

 

Cryptographic Protocol Composition via the Authentication Tests

 

Joshua D. Guttman

The MITRE Corporation

 

Although cryptographic protocols are typically analyzed in isolation, they are used in combinations.  If a protocol Pi_1, when analyzed alone, was shown to meet some security goals, will it still meet those goals when executed together with a second protocol Pi_2?  Not necessarily:  for every Pi_1, some Pi_2s undermine its goals.  We use the strand space ``authentication test'' principles to suggest a criterion to ensure a Pi_2 preserves Pi_1's goals; this criterion strengthens previous proposals.

 

Security goals for Pi_1 are expressed in a language L(Pi_1) in classical logic.  Strand spaces provide the models for L(Pi_1).  Certain homomorphisms among models for L(Pi) 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 momorphisms among models to prove results about a syntactically defined set of formulas, appears to be novel for protocol analysis.

 

Appears in: Foundations of Software Science and Computation Structures, ETAPS, March 2009.  LNCS 5504.

 

Paper available at:

  http://www.dcs.qmul.ac.uk/~joshuag/pubs/fossacs_disjoint.pdf

 

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