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Soft Constraints for Security Protocol Analysis: Confidentiality

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Practical Aspects of Declarative Languages (PADL 2001)

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Abstract

We model any network configuration arising from the execution of a security protocol as a soft constraint satisfaction problem (SCSP). We formalise the protocol goal of confidentiality as a property of the solution for an SCSP, hence confidentiality always holds with a certain security level. The policySCSP models the network configuration where all admissible protocol sessions have terminated successfully, and an imputable SCSP models a given network configuration. Comparing the solutions of these two problems elicits whether the given configuration hides a confidentiality attack. We can also compare attacks and decide which is the most significant. The approach is demonstrated on the asymmetric Needham-Schroeder protocol.

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Bella, G., Bistarelli, S. (2001). Soft Constraints for Security Protocol Analysis: Confidentiality. In: Ramakrishnan, I.V. (eds) Practical Aspects of Declarative Languages. PADL 2001. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1990. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45241-9_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45241-9_8

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