CVS: a compiler for the analysis of cryptographic protocols

The Security Process Algebra (SPA) is a CCS-like specification language where actions belong to two different levels of confidentiality. It has been used to define several non-interference-like security properties whose verification has been automatized by means of the tool CoSeC. In recent years, a method for analyzing security protocols using SPA and CoSeC has been developed. Even if it has been useful in analyzing small security protocols, this method has shown to be error-prone as it requires the description by hand of the protocol and of the environment in which it will execute. This problem has been solved by defining a protocol specification language more abstract than SPA, called VSP and a compiler CVS that generates in an automatic way the SPA specification for a given protocol described in VSP. The VSP/CVS technology is very powerful and its usefulness is shown with the case-study of the Woo-Lam one-way authentication protocol, for which an attack undocumented in the literature is found.