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Symbolic Bisimulation in the Spi Calculus

  • Conference paper
CONCUR 2004 - Concurrency Theory (CONCUR 2004)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 3170))

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Abstract

The spi calculus is an executable model for the description and analysis of cryptographic protocols. Security objectives like secrecy and authenticity can be formulated as equations between spi calculus terms, where equality is interpreted as a contextual equivalence.

One problem with verifying contextual equivalences for messagepassing process calculi is the infinite branching on process input. In this paper, we propose a general symbolic semantics for the spi calculus, where an input prefix gives rise to only one transition.

To avoid infinite quantification over contexts, non-contextual concrete bisimulations approximating barbed equivalence have been defined. We propose a symbolic bisimulation that is sound with respect to barbed equivalence, and brings us closer to automated bisimulation checks.

Supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation, grant No. 21-65180.1.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer and Communication Sciences, EPFL-I&C, 1015, Lausanne, Switzerland

    Johannes Borgström, Sébastien Briais & Uwe Nestmann

Authors
  1. Johannes Borgström
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  2. Sébastien Briais
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  3. Uwe Nestmann
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computing, Imperial College London, 180 Queen’s Gate, SW7 2AZ, London, UK

    Philippa Gardner

  2. Department of Computing, Imperial College, London, UK

    Nobuko Yoshida

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Borgström, J., Briais, S., Nestmann, U. (2004). Symbolic Bisimulation in the Spi Calculus. In: Gardner, P., Yoshida, N. (eds) CONCUR 2004 - Concurrency Theory. CONCUR 2004. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3170. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-28644-8_11

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-28644-8_11

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-22940-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-28644-8

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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