Process calculi and the verification of security protocols

Abstract

Recently there has been much interest towards using formal methods in the analysis of security protocols. Some recent approaches take advantage of concepts and techniques from the field of process calculi. Process calculi can be given a formal yet simple semantics, which permits rigorous definitions of such concepts as ``attacker``, ``secrecy`` and ``authentication``. This feature has led to the development of solid reasoning methods and verification techniques, a few of which we outline in this paper.