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Typing Messages for Free in Security Protocols

Published: 12 September 2019 Publication History

Abstract

Security properties of cryptographic protocols are typically expressed as reachability or equivalence properties. Secrecy and authentication are examples of reachability properties, while privacy properties such as untraceability, vote secrecy, or anonymity are generally expressed as behavioral equivalence in a process algebra that models security protocols.
Our main contribution is to reduce the search space for attacks for reachability as well as equivalence properties. Specifically, we show that if there is an attack then there is one that is well-typed. Our result holds for a large class of typing systems, a family of equational theories that encompasses all standard primitives, and protocols without else branches. For many standard protocols, we deduce that it is sufficient to look for attacks that follow the format of the messages expected in an honest execution, therefore considerably reducing the search space.

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    Published In

    cover image ACM Transactions on Computational Logic
    ACM Transactions on Computational Logic  Volume 21, Issue 1
    January 2020
    271 pages
    ISSN:1529-3785
    EISSN:1557-945X
    DOI:10.1145/3361969
    • Editor:
    • Orna Kupferman
    Issue’s Table of Contents
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Publication History

    Published: 12 September 2019
    Accepted: 01 July 2019
    Revised: 01 April 2019
    Received: 01 March 2018
    Published in TOCL Volume 21, Issue 1

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    Author Tags

    1. Security protocols
    2. symbolic model
    3. trace equivalence
    4. verification

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    • DGA
    • European Research Council (ERC)
    • European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program
    • ANR project TECAP

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