Introduction: Virtually Perfect Security (Transcript of Discussion)

Abstract

Hello everyone, and welcome to the 18th Security Protocols Workshop. Our theme this year is “Virtually Perfect Security”, which is an attempt to tie together three slightly different interlocking strands. The first is the fact that although we talk about security as if it were some sort of metaphysical property (so that a system is either secure or isn’t), we all know that really whether a system is secure or not depends on the context which you put it, and you can move a system to a different context and change whether it’s secure or not. In practice, we also usually prove security relative to a particular abstraction, and the danger is that we have a system that “really” is secure, and then we discover that the attacker is using a different abstraction. Our attempt to find abstractions which the attacker can’t fool with this trick with has pushed us into talking about security using abstractions that are further and further away from anything that a user might think of as comprehensible or convenient.