Using Refinement to Analyse the Safety of an Authentication Protocol

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Description/Abstract

This paper describes an approach to the analysis of security protocols using Abrial's B method. B is a general purpose formal method based on standard set theory and predicate logic. The refinement rule we use means that we only check for safety properties such as authentication rather than liveness properties such as absence of denial of service. The contribution of this paper is the development of a style of modelling and reasoning with B that allows for a straightforward and thorough analysis of security protocols. This analysis contributes to the understanding of a protocol and could lead to an improvement in the design of security protocols.