UNCC College of Computing and Informatics

Graduate Seminar (2009 Fall)

Title: Modeling Knowledge in Security Protocols

Zhiwei Li

Ph.D student

Department of Software & Information Systems

University of North Carolina at Charlotte

September 4 at 3:00pm
106 Woodward

Abstract:

The importance of reasoning about knowledge in security protocol analysis has long been recognized. While knowledge has been implicitly or explicitly referred in many existing approaches to security protocol verification, there are few studies on the general knowledge model of protocol participants and attackers. To fill this gap, we propose a general knowledge model to represent the deductive knowledge in security protocols. The evolvement of the knowledge model during protocol executions is investigated. The knowledge model has the desirable features such as uniqueness and existence. Using Dolev-Yao model as an example, we design two algorithms to generate the knowledge representation and derive terms, respectively.

To demonstrate the advantages of the proposed approach, we integrate it with Athena to build a new protocol verifier. The new approach will drastically reduce the number of states that are examined during protocol verification. Experiments on several cryptographic protocols widely used for evaluating protocol verifiers demonstrate the improvements. The research shows that the integration of knowledge reasoning and verification techniques will shed lights on the study of security protocols.

Bio:

Zhiwei Li is a third year PhD student in the Department of Software & Information Systems co-advised by Prof. Weichao Wang (SIS) and Prof. Aidong Lu (CS). He is currently working in cryptographic protocol verification and knowledge reasoning, with a special emphasis on formal methods.

Back