Safe Equivalences for Security Properties

In the field of Security, process equivalences have been used to characterize various information-hiding properties (for instance secrecy, anonymity and non-interference) based on the principle that a protocol P with a variable x satisfies such property if and only if, for every pair of secrets s1 and s2, P [1/x] is equivalent to P [2/x]. We argue that, in the presence of nondeterminism, the above principle relies on the assumption that the scheduler “works for the benefit of the protocol”, and this is usually not a safe assumption. Non-safe equivalences, in this sense, include complete-trace equivalence and bisimulation. We present a formalism in which we can specify admissible schedulers and, correspondingly, safe versions of these equivalences. We prove that safe bisimulation is still a congruence. Finally, we show that safe equivalences can be used to establish information-hiding properties.