Abstract

This paper describes automatic protocol generation (APG for short), a novel mechanism to generate security protocols automatically. With APG, the protocol designer inputs the specification of the desired security properties and the system requirements. The system requirements include a metric function which specifies the cost or overhead of protocol primitives, which defines an ordering over protocols with respect to the metric function. Based on this ordering, APG explores the protocol space and outputs the correct protocol which has minimal cost with respect to the metric function, as well as satisfies the security properties and system requirements. The APG approach has several advantages over the current protocol design process. It is fully automatic, and hence, more efficient than a manual process. The protocols generated by APG offer higher confidence, because they are verified by a powerful protocol analyzer. Another significant advantage is that, because APG search through the ...

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