This chapter gives an introduction of Petri nets, its applications and security challenges. Petri nets are a graphical and mathematical modeling tool available to many systems. Once a system is modeled as a Petri net, the behavior of the system can be simulated by using tokens on the Petri net. Petri nets' abundant techniques can be used to solve many problems associated with the modeled system. This chapter gives formal definitions, properties and analysis methods of Petri nets, and gives several examples to illustrate some basic concepts and successful application areas of Petri nets. Then this chapter presents Petri nets based challenges to security such as Intrusion Detection System, security policy design and analysis, and cryptography tool.
We first introduce formal definitions, properties and analysis methods of Petri nets. These are based on the many books, surveys, and research papers. The most popular introductory books are Refs. (Peterson, 1981), (Desel, 1995), and (Reisig, 2013). The most important survey is Ref. (Murata, 1989).