Computational soundness of formal adversaries
Jonathan C. Herzog · DSpace@MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) · 2002
The Dolev-Yao model is a useful and widespread framework in which to analyze security protocols. However, it models the messages of the protocol at a very high level and makes extremely strong assumptions about the power of the adversary. The computational model of cryptography and cryptographic protocols takes a much more low-level view of messages and uses much weaker assumptions. A major result of this work will be the demonstration that certain kinds of computational cryptography can result in an equivalence of sorts between the formal and computational adversary. Specifically, we give an interpretation to the messages of the Dolev-Yao model in terms of computational cryptography. We then define a computational security condition on the powers of the computational adversary, and show that this condition limits the computational adversary to the operations of the Dolev-Yao adversary. Lastly, we show that this security condition is achievable using standard computational cryptographic constructs.