Two distinct, rigorous views of cryptography have developed over the years, in two mostly separate communities. One of the views relies on a simple but effective formal approach; the other, on a detailed computational model that considers issues of complexity and probability.

We develop principles and rules for achieving secrecy properties in security protocols. Our approach is based on traditional classification techniques, and extends those techniques to handle concurrent processes that use shared-key cryptography. The rules have the form of typing rules for a basic concurrent language with cryptographic primitives, the spi calculus. They guarantee that, if a protocol typechecks, then it does not leak its secret inputs.

We study the interaction of the "new" construct with a rich but common form of (first-order) communication. This interaction is crucial in security protocols, which are the main motivating examples for our work; it also appears in other programming-language contexts. Specifically, we introduce a simple, general extension of the pi calculus with value passing, primitive functions, and equations among terms. We develop semantics and proof techniques for this extended language and apply them in reasoning about some security protocols.

Abstract. We discuss the difficulties caused by mobile computing and mobile computation over wide area networks. We propose a unified framework for overcoming such difficulties. 1

Contextual equivalences for cryptographic process calculi, like the spi-calculus, can be used to reason about correctness of protocols, but their definition suffers from quantification over all possible contexts. Here, we focus on two such equivalences, namely may-testing and barbed equivalence, and investigate tractable proof methods for them. To this aim, we design an enriched labelled transition system, where transitions are constrained by the knowledge the environment has of names and keys. The new transition system is then used to define a trace equivalence and a weak bisimulation equivalence, that avoid quantification over contexts. Our main results are soundness and completeness of trace and weak bisimulation equivalence with respect to may-testing and barbed equivalence, respectively. They lead to more direct proof methods for equivalence checking. The use of these methods is illustrated with a few examples, concerning implementation of secure channels and verification of proto...

We generate a natural hierarchy of equivalences for asynchronous name-passing process calculi from simple variations on Milner and Sangiorgi's definition of weak barbed bisimulation. The -calculus, used here, and the join calculus are examples of such calculi.

We propose an object-oriented calculus with internal concurrency and class-based inheritance that is built upon the join calculus. Method calls, locks, and states are handled in a uniform manner, using asynchronous messages. Classes are partial message definitions that can be combined and transformed. We design operators for behavioral and synchronization inheritance. We also give a type system that statically enforces basic safety properties. Our model is compatible with the JoCaml implementation

In these notes, we give an overview of the join calculus, its semantics, and its equational theory. The join calculus is a language that models distributed and mobile programming. It is characterized by an explicit notion of locality, a strict adherence to local synchronization, and a direct embedding of the ML programming language. The join calculus is used as the basis for several distributed languages and implementations, such as JoCaml and functional nets.

Specifications for security protocols range from informal narrations of message flows to formal assertions of protocol properties. This paper discusses those specifications, emphasizing authenticity and secrecy properties. It also suggests some gaps and some opportunities for further work. Some of them pertain to the traditional core of the field; others appear when we examine the context in which protocols operate.

Adopting a programming-language perspective, we study the problem of implementing authentication in a distributed system. We define a process calculus with constructs for authentication and show how this calculus can be translated to a lower-level language using marshaling, multiplexing, and cryptographic protocols. Authentication serves for identitybased security in the source language and enables simplifications in the translation. We reason about correctness relying on the concepts of observational equivalence and full abstraction.