Design and Validation of Computer Protocols

This report aims at giving a short overview on rank function analysis of authentication protocols concentrating on the results of Schneider in [4] and Heather in [2]. Therefore it shows a standard form of protocol implementation in CSP, shows how authentication properties can be captured as trace specifications, gives basic definitions necessary to reason about the unbounded set of messages, reformulates the central rank function theorem and restates it proof. Additionally it gives hints on applying this approach to verify secrecy protocols as well, a short overview on tool support available and some hints on interesting properties of rank functions. This report will use notations introduced in earlier reports [11-16] throughout and only reintroduce notations where they are considered vital.