Reasoning about Accountability within Delegation

We propose a framework for the analysis of delegation proto cols Our framework allows to analyse how accountability is transferred or kept by delegator when he transfers some of her rights to delegate The ability to trace how accountability is distributed among principals of a system is crucial in many transactions that have a legal value because accountability is usually a prerequisite to guarantee other well known security properties e g non repudiation Our approach starts from the notion of provability to formalise accountability Then we introduce new speci cations for the analysis of delegation protocols and the distri bution of credentials necessary to exercise delegated rights