Myrto Arapinis, Stéphanie Delaune, and Steve Kremer. Dynamic Tags for Security Protocols. Logical Methods in Computer Science, 10(2:11), June 2014.
The design and verification of cryptographic protocols is a notoriously difficult task, even in symbolic models which take an abstract view of cryptography. This is mainly due to the fact that protocols may interact with an arbitrary attacker which yields a verification problem that has several sources of unboundedness (size of messages, number of sessions, etc. In this paper, we characterize a class of protocols for which deciding security for an unbounded number of sessions is decidable. More precisely, we present a simple transformation which maps a protocol that is secure for a bounded number of protocol sessions (a decidable problem) to a protocol that is secure for an unbounded number of sessions. The precise number of sessions that need to be considered is a function of the security property and we show that for several classical security properties a single session is sufficient. Therefore, in many cases our results yields a design strategy for security protocols: (i) design a protocol intended to be secure for a single session; and (ii) apply our transformation to obtain a protocol which is secure for an unbounded number of sessions.
@article{ADK-lmcs14,
abstract = {The design and verification of cryptographic
protocols is a notoriously difficult task, even in
symbolic models which take an abstract view of
cryptography. This is mainly due to the fact that
protocols may interact with an arbitrary attacker
which yields a verification problem that has several
sources of unboundedness (size of messages, number of
sessions, etc. In this paper, we characterize a class
of protocols for which deciding security for an
unbounded number of sessions is decidable. More
precisely, we present a simple transformation which
maps a protocol that is secure for a bounded number
of protocol sessions (a~decidable problem) to a
protocol that is secure for an unbounded number of
sessions. The precise number of sessions that need to
be considered is a function of the security property
and we show that for several classical security
properties a single session is sufficient. Therefore,
in many cases our results yields a design strategy
for security protocols: (i)~design a protocol
intended to be secure for a {single session}; and
(ii)~apply our transformation to obtain a protocol
which is secure for an unbounded number of sessions.},
author = {Arapinis, Myrto and Delaune, St{\'e}phanie and
Kremer, Steve},
OPTDOI = {10.2168/LMCS-10(2:11)2014},
journal = {Logical Methods in Computer Science},
month = jun,
number = {2:11},
title = {Dynamic Tags for Security Protocols},
volume = {10},
year = {2014},
nmonth = {6},
lsv-category = {jour},
wwwpublic = {public and ccsb},
}