2014/03/05 by Steve Kremer, Kremer, Steve, Robert Künnemann +1 · 1 citation
Computer Science · #Advanced Authentication Protocols Security #Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Formal Methods in Verification #Security and Verification in Computing
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1403.1142
openalex publication_date 2014/03/05 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Security APIs, key servers and protocols that need to keep the status of transactions, require to maintain a global, non-monotonic state, e.g., in the form of a database or register. However, most existing automated verification tools do not support the analysis of such stateful security protocols - sometimes because of fundamental reasons, such as the encoding of the protocol as Horn clauses, which are inherently monotonic. A notable exception is the recent tamarin prover which allows specifying protocols as multiset rewrite (msr) rules, a formalism expressive enough to encode state. As multiset rewriting is a "low-level" specification language with no direct support for concurrent message passing, encoding protocols correctly is a difficult and error-prone process. We propose a process calculus which is a variant of the applied pi calculus with constructs for manipulation of a global state by processes running in parallel. We show that this language can be translated to msr rules whilst preserving all security properties expressible in a dedicated first-order logic for security properties. The translation has been implemented in a prototype tool which uses the tamarin prover as a backend. We apply the tool to several case studies among which a simplified fragment of PKCS#11, the Yubikey security token, and an optimistic contract signing protocol.