What is Correctness of Security Protocols?
Giampaolo Bella · 2020
Abstract. This title question has been seeing a number of researchers up many nights long. As soon as major protocol flaws were discovered empirically — a good luck that is not older than the early 1990s — this question came up to the world. It was soon realised that some notion of formal correctness was necessary to substantiate the confidence derived from informal analyses. But protocol correctness was born in a decade when security in general was only beginning to ferment. Security protocols aim at such a variety of goals that only their various human understandings could further enlarge. This is partly due to the increasing domains where the protocols are finding an application, such as secure access to local-area network services, secure e-mail, e-commerce, public-key registration at certification authorities and so on. But it is also significantly due to the variety of interpretations that virtually each researcher tends to use for each goal. As it is clear to any expert in formal methods, it is impossible to study