A Generalized Two-Phase Analysis of Knowledge Flows in Security Protocols

TL;DR

This paper presents a flexible formalism called knowledge flow analysis for verifying cryptographic protocols, extending the two-phase theory to a broad class of primitives and providing a library of standards.

Contribution

It introduces a generalized two-phase analysis framework and identifies necessary properties of cryptographic primitives for protocol verification.

Findings

Extended the two-phase theory to more primitives

Developed a library of standard cryptographic primitives

Validated the primitives satisfy the proposed criteria

Abstract

We introduce knowledge flow analysis, a simple and flexible formalism for checking cryptographic protocols. Knowledge flows provide a uniform language for expressing the actions of principals, assump- tions about intruders, and the properties of cryptographic primitives. Our approach enables a generalized two-phase analysis: we extend the two-phase theory by identifying the necessary and sufficient proper- ties of a broad class of cryptographic primitives for which the theory holds. We also contribute a library of standard primitives and show that they satisfy our criteria.