Knowledge flow analysis offers a simple and flexible way to find flaws in security protocols. A protocol is described by a collection of rules constraining the propagation of knowledge amongst principals. Because this characterization corresponds closely to informal descriptions of protocols, it allows a succinct and natural formalization; because it abstracts away message ordering, and handles communications between principals and applications of cryptographic primitives uniformly, it is readily represented in a standard logic. A generic framework in the Alloy modelling language is presented, and instantiated for two standard protocols, and a new key management scheme.
@cite_1: The NRL Protocol Analyzer is a prototype special-purpose verification tool, written in Prolog, that has been developed for the analysis of cryptographic protocols that are used to authenticate principals and services and distribute keys in a network. In this paper we give an overview of how the Analyzer works and describe its achievements so far. We also show how our use of the Prolog language benefited us in the design and implementation of the Analyzer.
Proof building tools such as NRL, based on Prolog @cite_1 , have also been helpful for analyzing security protocols. However, they are not fully automatic and often require extensive user intervention. Model checkers lead to completely automated tools which generate counterexamples if a protocol is flawed. For theorem-proving-based approaches, counterexamples are hard to produce.