Abstract

Human understanding of protocols is central to protocol security. The security of a protocol rests on its designers, its implementors, and, in some cases, its users correctly conceptualizing how it should work, understanding how it actually works, and predicting how others will think it works. Ensuring these conceptualizations are correct is difficult. A complementary field, however, provides some inspiration on how to proceed: the field of language-theoretic security (LangSec) promotes the adoption of a secure design-and-development methodology that emphasizes the existence of certain computability boundaries that must never be crossed during parser and protocol construction to ensure correctness of design and implementation. We propose supplementing this work on classical computability boundaries with exploration of human-computability boundaries. Classic computability research has focused on …

Date

2020

Authors

Vijay Kothari, Prashant Anantharaman, Ira Ray Jenkins, Michael C Millian, J Peter Brady, Sameed Ali, Sergey Bratus, Jim Blythe, Ross Koppel, Sean W Smith

Conference

Security Protocols XXVII: 27th International Workshop, Cambridge, UK, April 10–12, 2019, Revised Selected Papers 27

Pages

157-166

Publisher

Springer International Publishing