Secure Process Algebra
This work offers a formal method for verifying security protocols, which is incremental as it builds on existing process algebra frameworks.
The authors tackled the problem of verifying security protocols by extending a truly concurrent process algebra (APTC) to create Secure APTC (SAPTC), which provides a theoretical foundation and rich expressive power for modeling cryptographic operations and communication mechanisms.
Based on our previous work on truly concurrent process algebras APTC, we use it to verify the security protocols. This work (called Secure APTC, abbreviated SAPTC) have the following advantages in verifying security protocols: (1) It has a firmly theoretic foundations, including equational logics, structured operational semantics, and axiomatizations between them; (2) It has rich expressive powers to describe security protocols. Cryptographic operations are modeled as atomic actions and can be extended, explicit parallelism and communication mechanism to modeling communication operations and principals, rich computational properties to describing computational logics in the security protocols, including conditional guards, alternative composition, sequential composition, parallelism and communication, encapsulation and deadlock, recursion, abstraction. (3) Especially by abstraction, it is convenient and obvious to observe the relations between the inputs and outputs of a security protocols, including the relations without any attack, the relations under each known attack, and the relations under unknown attacks if the unknown attacks can be described.