Term-based composition of security protocols

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel term-based composition approach for security protocols, extending strand spaces to enable secure parallel composition of message components and ensuring property preservation.

Contribution

It presents a new protocol specification model and a term composition algorithm that maintain security properties during protocol composition.

Findings

The proposed model effectively composes protocols while preserving security properties.

The term composition algorithm constructs new message components securely.

Application to existing protocols demonstrates practical utility.

Abstract

In the context of security protocol parallel composition, where messages belonging to different protocols can intersect each other, we introduce a new paradigm: term-based composition (i.e. the composition of message components also known as terms). First, we create a protocol specification model by extending the original strand spaces. Then, we provide a term composition algorithm based on which new terms can be constructed. To ensure that security properties are maintained, we introduce the concept of term connections to express the existing connections between terms and encryption contexts. We illustrate the proposed composition process by using two existing protocols.