Automated Formal Methods for Security Protocol Engineering

Abstract

Designing and implementing security protocols are known to be error-prone tasks. Recent research progress in the field of formal methods applied to security protocols has enabled the use of these techniques in practice. The objective of this chapter is to give a circumstantial account of the state-of-the-art reached in this field, showing how formal methods can help in improving quality. Since automation is a key factor for the acceptability of these techniques in the engineering practice, the chapter focuses on automated techniques and illustrates in particular how high-level protocol models in the Dolev-Yao style can be automatically analyzed and how it is possible to automatically enforce formal correspondence between an abstract high-level model and an implementation.