From Security Protocols to Pushdown Automata

Abstract

Formal methods have been very successful in analyzing security protocols for reachability properties such as secrecy or authentication. In contrast, there are very few results for equivalence-based properties, crucial for studying e.g. privacy-like properties such as anonymity or vote secrecy. We study the problem of checking equivalence of security protocols for an unbounded number of sessions. Since replication leads very quickly to undecidability (even in the simple case of secrecy), we focus on a limited fragment of protocols (standard primitives but pairs, one variable per protocol's rules) for which the secrecy preservation problem is known to be decidable. Surprisingly, this fragment turns out to be undecidable for equivalence. Then, restricting our attention to deterministic protocols, we propose the first decidability result for checking equivalence of protocols for an unbounded number of sessions. This result is obtained through a characterization of equivalence of protocols in terms of equality of languages of (generalized, real-time) deterministic pushdown automata.