Bounding the number of agents, for equivalence too

Véronique Cortier (1) , Antoine Dallon (2, 1) , Stéphanie Delaune (2)

1 PESTO - Proof techniques for security protocols
2 LSV - Laboratoire Spécification et Vérification [Cachan]

Bounding the number of agents is a current practice when modeling a protocol. In 2003, it has been shown that one honest agent and one dishonest agent are indeed sufficient to find all possible attacks, for secrecy properties. This is no longer the case for equivalence properties , crucial to express many properties such as vote privacy or untrace-ability. In this paper, we show that it is sufficient to consider two honest agents and two dishonest agents for equivalence properties, for deterministic processes with standard primitives and without else branches. More generally , we show how to bound the number of agents for arbitrary con-structor theories and for protocols with simple else branches. We show that our hypotheses are tight, providing counterexamples for non action-deterministic processes, non constructor theories, or protocols with complex else branches.

Domaines: Cryptographie et sécurité [cs.CR]

Véronique Cortier, Antoine Dallon, Stéphanie Delaune. Bounding the number of agents, for equivalence too. 5th International Conference on Principles of Security and Trust (POST'16), Apr 2016, Eindhoven, Netherlands. pp.211-232, ⟨10.1007/978-3-662-49635-0_11⟩. ⟨hal-01361286⟩