Clap, a Simple Language for Cryptographic Protocols

We describe the design of Clap, a simple speciication language devoted to cryptographic protocols (exclusively). Its main design principle is that it should be not only possible, but relatively easy, to prove security properties of Clap protocols automatically on a machine. To this end, Clap is very restricted. We can think of Clap as isolating what can be thought as a set of essential programming constructs and some essential speciication phrases needed in the domain of cryptographic protocols. It is paradoxical but important to note that, in proving security properties, the main strength of Clap is its absence of unneeded features. We then describe how actual implementations can be automatically extracted from Clap speciications.