2003/06/17 by Joseph Y. Halpern, Riccardo Pucella
Computer Science · #cs.CR
published as ACM Transactions on Information and System Security 6:1, 2003, pp. 43--70 · A preliminary version of this paper appears in the Proceedings of the 8th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security,2001
arxiv created 2003/06/17 · arxiv updated 2009/11/30
Strand spaces are a popular framework for the analysis of security protocols. Strand spaces have some similarities to a formalism used successfully to model protocols for distributed systems, namely multi-agent systems. We explore the exact relationship between these two frameworks here. It turns out that a key difference is the handling of agents, which are unspecified in strand spaces and explicit in multi-agent systems. We provide a family of translations from strand spaces to multi-agent systems parameterized by the choice of agents in the strand space. We also show that not every multi-agent system of interest can be expressed as a strand space. This reveals a lack of expressiveness in the strand-space framework that can be characterized by our translation. To highlight this lack of expressiveness, we show one simple way in which strand spaces can be extended to model more systems.