Attack-preserving Security Protocol Transformations

The rigorous incremental development of security protocols has so far received much less attention than protocol verification techniques. In this work, we study security protocol transformations. These can serve both for simplifying protocols before verification and, in the other direction, for developing protocols by stepwise refinement of simple abstract protocols into complex concrete ones. The transformations preserve attacks on a class of security properties. Our work aims to improve our understanding of modifications of existing protocols and to enable the systematic development of entire families of new protocols. This complements existing work on post-hoc protocol verification.