Model Checking Temporal Logics of Knowledge and Its Application in Security Verification

Abstract

Model checking has being used mainly to check if a system satisfies the specifications expressed in temporal logic and people pay little attention to the problem for model checking logics of knowledge. However, in the distributed systems community, the desirable specifications of systems and protocols have been expressed widely in logics of knowledge. In this paper, based on the SMV, by the semantics of knowledge and set theory, approaches for model checking logics of knowledge and common knowledge are presented. These approaches make SMV’s functions extended from temporal logics to temporal logics of knowledge. We will illustrate in an example the applications to security verifications for a cryptographic protocol.