Uncertainty Issues in Secure Messages

Abstract

Traditional protocol analysis ideally assumes that the transmitted messages are secure and consistent between principals. However, the described hostile environments might cause inconsistent messages such as intercepted, missing, or tampered messages, and conflicting beliefs in the messages. It is very difficult to express these situations using previous methods. Although the inconsistency of secure messages and the degree of conflicting beliefs can aid in evaluating the performance of protocols, they are usually uncertain rather than simply true or false. As important complement to protocol analysis, this chapter discusses two primary uncertainty issues including the estimation of inconsistency of messages and the integration of conflicting beliefs. We not only present intuitive ways to measure both uncertainties but also give some case studies to illustrate the usefulness of our approaches.