Section: Scientific Foundations

Model checking

Participants : Miguel Andrés, Catuscia Palamidessi.

We plan to develop model-checking techniques and tools for verifying properties of systems and protocols specified in the above formalisms.

Model checking addresses the problem of establishing whether the model (for instance, a finite-state machine) of a certain specification satisfies a certain logical formula.

We intend to concentrate our efforts on aspects that are fundamental for the verification of security protocols, and that are not properly considered in existing tools. Namely, we will focus on:

(a)

the combination of probability and mobility, which is not provided by any of the current model checkers,

(b)

the interplay between nondeterminism and probability, which in security present subtleties that cannot be handled with the traditional notion of scheduler,

(c)

the development of a logic for expressing security (in particular privacy) properties.

Concerning the last point (the logic), we should capture both probabilistic and epistemological aspects, the latter being necessary for treating the knowledge of the adversary.

Logics of this kind have been already developed, but the investigation of the relation with the models coming from process calculi, and their utilization in model checking, is still in its infancy.