Section: Application Domains

Security Protocols

Security protocols use cryptography in order to guarantee the security of exchanges over an insecure network, such as the Internet. The design of security protocols is notoriously error-prone: errors have been found in many published protocols. Security errors can have serious consequences, such as loss of money in the case of electronic commerce. Moreover, security errors cannot be detected by testing, because they appear only in the presence of a malicious adversary. Security protocols are therefore an important area for formal verification.

The work of the Abstraction project-team on security protocols has led to the development of two successful automatic protocol verifiers, ProVerif in the formal model and CryptoVerif in the computational model, and we plan to pursue research on this topic, in particular with extensions to CryptoVerif .