Soft Constraints for Security Protocol Analysis: Confidentiality

We model any network configuration arising from the execution of a security protocol as a soft constraint satisfaction problem (SCSP). We formalise the protocol goal of confidentiality as a property of the solution for an SCSP, hence confidentiality always holds with a certain security level. The policy SCSP models the network configuration where all admissible protocol sessions have terminated successfully, and an imputable SCSP models a given network configuration. Comparing the solutions of these two problems elicits whether the given configuration hides a confidentiality attack. We can also compare attacks and decide which is the most significant. The approach is demonstrated on the asymmetric Needham-Schroeder protocol.

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