Towards the attacker's view of protocol narrations (or, how to compile security protocols)

Abstract

As protocol narrations are widely used to describe security protocols, efforts have been made to formalize or devise semantics for them. An important, but largely neglected, question is whether or not the formalism faithfully accounts for the attacker's view. Several attempts have been made in the literature to recover the attacker's view. They, however, are rather restricted in scope and quite complex. This greatly impedes the ability of protocol verification tools to detect intricate attacks. In this paper, we establish a faithful view of the attacker based on rigorous, yet intuitive, interpretations of exchanged messages. This gives us a new way to look at attacks and protocol implementations. Specifically, we identify two types of attacks that can be thawed through adjusting the protocol implementation; and show that such an ideal implementation does not always exist. Overall, the obtained attacker's view provides a path to more secure protocol designs and implementations.