Qualitative and Quantitative Proofs of Security Properties

Abstract

The goal of this project has been to develop logics for reasoning about security at both the qualitative and quantitative level. Two approaches have been considered. The first builds on a logic designed by the PI that has a binary operator ->, where p->q is interested as "the probability of p given q goes to 1." The logic has been applied to proving the correctness of a variety of security protocols. Doing this required extending the original logic to include additional operators for reasoning about traces, essentially with features in the spirit of dynamic logic. A sound proof system for the extended logic was developed. The second approach involves a logic for reasoning about knowledge, probability and time. A special case, restricting to only probability 1 statements, gives a qualitative logic of belief. A key innovation in the logic is distinguishing between strings and message terms. This allows an agent receiving a string s that represents a message m encrypted by a key k to be uncertain about what message term the strings represents. It is shown that this approach deals with resource-bounded agents in a natural and powerful way.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Apr 01, 2013
Accession Number
ADA583931

Entities

People

  • Joseph Halpern

Organizations

  • Cornell University

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Autonomy
  • Cyber

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Air Force Research Laboratories
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Autonomous Agents
  • Computer Science
  • Cryptography
  • Decision Theory
  • Distributed Computing
  • Game Theory
  • Language
  • Multiagent Systems
  • Probability
  • Reasoning
  • Security
  • Security Protocols
  • Social Sciences
  • Students
  • Theoretical Computer Science

Readers

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  • Mathematical Modeling and Probability Theory.
  • Team-Based Human-Centered Cognitive Task Decision Making and Information Performance.