Reconciling Operational and Epistemic Approaches to the Formal Analysis of Crypto-Based Security Protocols

We propose a unifying framework for formal specification and verification of both epistemic and behavioral aspects of security protocols. The main novelty of the proposed framework is the explicit support for cryptographic constructs, which is among the most essential ingredients of security protocols. Due to this feature, the indistinguishability relation for the epistemic constructs gets a dynamic semantics by taking the communicated keys and cryptographic terms in the operational specification into account.