On the decidability of cryptographic protocols with open-ended data structures

摘要

Formal analysis of cryptographic protocols has concentrated mainly on protocols with closed-ended data structures, i.e., protocols where the messages exchanged between principals have fixed and finite format. In many protocols, however, the data structures used are open-ended, i.e., messages have an unbounded number of data fields. In this paper, decidability issues for such protocols are studied. We propose a protocol model in which principals are described by transducers, i.e., finite automata with output, and show that in this model security is decidable and PSPACE-hard in presence of the standard Dolev-Yao intruder.