Design and Analysis of Distributed Protocols with AnBx

Designing distributed protocols is challenging, as it requires actions at very different levels: from the choice of network-level mechanisms to protect the exchange of sensitive data, to the definition of structured interaction patterns to convey application-specific guarantees. Current security infrastructures provide very limited support for the specification of such interactions. As a consequence, the high-level security properties of a protocol typically must be hard-coded explicitly, in terms of low-level cryptographic notions and devices which clutter the design and undermine its scalability and robustness. To counter these problems, we propose an extension of the Alice & Bob notation for protocol narrations (AnBx) to serve as a specification language for a purely declarative modelling of distributed protocols. AnBx is built around a set of communication and data abstractions which provide primitive support for the high-level security guarantees required in the design of distributed protocols, and help shield the specification from the details of the underlying cryptographic infrastructure. AnBx is implemented on top of the OFMC [7, 31] verification tool, by means of a translation to the AnB language supported by OFMC. As a result, AnBx serves not only for specification and design, but also as a powerful tool for the security analysis of distributed protocols. We demonstrate the practical effectiveness of our approach with the specification and analysis of two real-life e-payment protocols: iKP [12, 11] and SET [8, 9, 10]. As reported in the paper, the declarative nature of the AnBx abstractions pays off, and results in protocol specifications with stronger, and more scalable security guarantees than those offered by the original protocols.

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