Martin Geisler Online

Today I’m at the [ETH][] to study for the exam in Formal Methods for Information Security, which will be next Tuesday.

I’m currently looking at BAN logic (see also Wikipedia), a nice system for proving (a limited set of) properties about security protocols. It deals with the beliefs of the participants in the protocol in a formal way. This allows you to verify that the goals of the protocol can be fulfilled based on the initial assumptions given. An example from BAN could be a rule that says:

If (P believes (Q controls X))
and (P believes (Q believes X))
then P believes X.

Here one should interpret the keyword controls as “has jurisdiction over”. An example could be a server S which has authority over the public keys for B:

If (A believes (S controls public key for B))
and (A believes (S believes public key for B = K_B))
then A believes public key for B = K_B.

So this rule expresses the trust of A in S. But for this rule to be applicable A needs to believe that S believes public key for B = K_B. There’s a rule for introducing such beliefs about other participants beliefs:

If (P believes (X is fresh))
and (P believes (Q said X))
then P believes (Q believes X)

This rule is based on an assumption that you will not say something which you do not believe. There are then more rules stating when you can believe that someone said something (for example, when that something was signed, and you believe in the key used for the signature).

From this big set of rules, one can make more and more deductions and hopefully derive the goals of the protocol. A simple, but pretty cool concept.

So… December finally arrived. Now is the time to get together, light lots of candles, drink warm tea, gløg, or something else, eat lots of candy, and generally have a nice and cozy time.

And if you don’t celebrate Christmas, then I still wish you a good time with lots of candles and candy and hot beverages :-)

Stéphanie and I will have our Christmasses apart from each other, just like last year. But this time it will be me who travels back and forth, and I’ll be back in Switzerland for the New Year. I’m looking forward to really see Switzerland covered with snow — so far we have only gotten a [little bit of snow][1] a couple of days ago. The temperature has lingered just around the freezing point since, but we haven’t had any precipitation and thus no snow.