Automatic design of network security protocols.

摘要

The last twenty-five years have seen an explosion in the number of networks in the world. With this has come the growing need for secure communication. As a result, security protocols have been developed to meet this need. Protocols have traditionally been designed only by humans. However, such methods are prone to error. One particular error of interest to us is that of having a security flaw, which a hacker could exploit.; In this thesis, we show how to use planning techniques from artificial intelligence to automate the design of basic network security protocols. Planning offers a goal-based approach to generating protocols, in which only relevant paths are explored. By looking at relevant paths, instead of using a brute-force search, we save execution time. We show how to use planning towards creating protocols that not only satisfy the specification, but are resistant towards passive attacks and replay attacks. Then, we show how we integrate the planner and security checker together, so that the protocols can be guaranteed to be secure against all attacks.; We focus our attention on a key distribution protocol and two electronic commerce protocols. We give specifications that are equivalent to those of existing protocols, run our protocol generator on those specifications, and examine the output protocols. Our implementation generates protocols similar to the existing protocols.