Abstract

LOPEZ PIMENTEL, Juan Carlos  and  MONROY, Raúl. Formal Support to Security Protocol Development: A Survey. Comp. y Sist. [online]. 2008, vol.12, n.1, pp.89-108. ISSN 2007-9737.

Security protocols aim to allow two or more principals to establish a secure communication over a hostile network, such as the Internet. The design of security protocols is particularly error-prone, because it is difficult to anticipate what an intruder may achieve interacting through a number of protocol runs, claiming to be an honest participant. Thus, the verification of security protocols has attracted a lot of interest in the formal methods community and as a result lots of verification techniques/tools, as well as good practices for protocol design, have appeared in the two last decades. In this paper, we describe the state of the art in automated tools that support security protocol development. This mainly involves tools for protocol verification and, to a lesser extent, for protocol synthesis and protocol diagnosis and repair. Also, we give an overview of the most significant principles for the design of security protocols and of the major problems that still need to be addressed in order to ease the development of security protocols.

Keywords : Formal methods; security protocols; protocol synthesis; protocol diagnosis and repair.

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