Overview of Security Protocol Analysis

Abstract

This chapter gives an overview of the fundamental concepts and formalism with respect to formal analysis and verification of security protocols that will be used in the rest of the book. Some recent studies into developing new formal methods to cope with the emerging issues and threats in this research field are also introduced to make clear the challenge in front of us and the current situation.

This chapter is organized as follows. In Section 2.1, we start with introducing some basic concepts, including the notations and terminology used in the book. Section 2.2 presents several security protocols, security service provided by protocols and principles of cryptography. In Section 2.3, we introduce the research into analysis and verification of security protocols. These are classified into different categories based on their specific purposes and theoretical foundation. Section 2.4, Section 2.5, Section 2.6 and Section 2.7 describe the attack-construction approach, inference-construction approach, proof-construction approach and other approaches using formal tools and languages, respectively. Finally, we summarize this chapter in Section 2.8.