Computational soundness without protocol restrictions
Michael Backes, Ankit Malik, Dominique Unruh · 2012
The abstraction of cryptographic operations by term algebras, called Dolev-Yao models, is essential in almost all tool-supported methods for verifying security protocols. Recently significant progress was made in establishing computational soundness results: these results prove that Dolev-Yao style models can be sound with respect to actual cryptographic realizations and security definitions. However, these results came at the cost of imposing various constraints on the set of permitted security protocols: e.g., dishonestly generated keys must not be used, key cycles need to be avoided, and many more. In a nutshell, the cryptographic security definitions did not adequately capture these cases, but were considered carved in stone; in contrast, the symbolic abstractions were bent to reflect cryptographic features and idiosyncrasies, thereby requiring adaptations of existing verification tools.