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An Omniscience-Free Temporal Logic of Knowledge for Verifying Authentication Protocols

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Abstract

Since the advent of BAN logic, many logics have been proposed for verifying authentication protocols. In one line of research, scholars have presented logics that can be utilized in verifying timed requirements of the protocols. Although many temporal epistemic logics have been developed to this end, there is no complete logic of this kind to prevent logical omniscience. Thus, they may lead to misleading judgments about the properties of the protocol being analyzed. In this paper, we propose a complete and omniscience-free temporal epistemic logic for analyzing authentication protocols. The main challenging issue in devising this logic is formulating intuitive models that on one hand reflect what is naturally meant by a protocol execution and on the other hand make it possible to achieve properties such as completeness. We show that such models can build on interpreted systems and that the resulting logic is useful in analyzing authentication protocols.

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Notes

  1. For technical reasons, we need to force \(\tau \) to be finite using a finite set of atomic messages and restricting the number of interleaving concatenations and encryptions.

  2. A message is fresh if it has not been sent in any message previously [9]. If a message is unfresh, it is subject to replay attacks.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to take this opportunity to thank Prof. Massoud Pourmahdian for his valuable comments in this research.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Engineering and Information Technology, Amirkabir University of Technology, Tehran, Iran

    S. Ahmadi & M. S. Fallah

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  1. S. Ahmadi
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  2. M. S. Fallah
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Correspondence to M. S. Fallah.

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Communicated by Ali Enayat.

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Ahmadi, S., Fallah, M.S. An Omniscience-Free Temporal Logic of Knowledge for Verifying Authentication Protocols. Bull. Iran. Math. Soc. 44, 1243–1265 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41980-018-0087-9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s41980-018-0087-9

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