Computational Soundness, Co-induction, and Encryption Cycles

We analyze the relation between induction, co-induction and the presence of encryption cycles in the context of computationally sound symbolic equivalence of cryptographic expressions. Our main finding is that the use of co-induction in the symbolic definition of the adversarial knowledge allows to prove unconditional soundness results, that do not require syntactic restrictions, like the absence of encryption cycles. Encryption cycles are relevant only to the extent that the key recovery function associated to acyclic expressions can be shown to have a unique fix-point. So, when a cryptographic expression has no encryption cycles, the inductive (least fix-point) and co-inductive (greatest fix-point) security definitions produce the same results, and the computational soundness of the inductive definitions for acyclic expressions follows as a special case of the soundness of the co-inductive definition. Reasoning about the Consequences of Authorization Policies in a Linear Epistemic Logic Henry DeYoung and Frank Pfenning! Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh PA 15213, USA {hdeyoung, fp}@cs.cmu.edu Abstract. Authorization policies are not stand-alone objects: they are used to selectively permit actions that change the state of a system. Authorization policies are not stand-alone objects: they are used to selectively permit actions that change the state of a system. Thus, it is desirable to have a framework for reasoning about the semantic consequences of policies. To this end, we extend a rewriting interpretation of linear logic with connectives for modeling affirmation, knowledge, and possession. To cleanly confine semantic effects to the rewrite sequence, we introduce a monad. The result is a richly expressive logic that elegantly integrates policies and their effects. After presenting this logic and its metatheory, we demonstrate its utility by proving properties that relate a simple file system’s policies to their semantic consequences.