Abstract

Abstract. Analysis methods for cryptographic protocols have often focused on information leakage rather than on seeing whether a protocol meets its goals. Many protocols, however, fall far short of meeting their goals, sometimes for quite subtle reasons. We introduce a mechanism for reasoning about belief as a systematic way to understand the working of cryptographic protocols. Our mechanism captures more features of such protocols than that given in a recent work [1], to which our proposals are a substantial extension. 1 Introduction Solutions to computer security problems over the last few years have brought forth the need for rigorous analysis methods. Formal tools must be provided to determine whether a solution indeed solves a problem, as well as to enable comparisons between proposed solutions. In this paper we propose a method for reasoning about cryptographic protocols in a distributed environment. The work described was inspired by the recent development of a modal logic to ...

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