Preserving security properties under refinement

Communication is one of the cornerstone of our everyday life. Guaranteeing the security of a communication is a very important challenge. In this paper, we propose a formal top-down approach for assuring that security properties are preserved during the development of a complex and concurrent system, i.e., within passage from specification to implementation of the components of the system. Indeed, we investigate on the set of requirements a refinement function has to satisfy for preserving a class of properties that can be formalized as specific instances of a general scheme, called Generalized Non Deducibility on Composition (GNDC). Hence, we show that it is possible to guarantee that the refinement of a considered system that is verified to be GNDC at a high level of abstraction, is GNDC also at a lower one without checking it again.

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