A Calculus for Cryptographic Protocols: The Spi Calculus
- Martı́n Abadi ,
- Andy Gordon
Proceedings of the 4th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security |
Published by Association for Computing Machinery, Inc.
We introduce the spi calculus, an extension of the pi calculus designed for the description and analysis of cryptographic protocols. We show how to use the spi calculus, particularly for studying authentication protocols. The pi calculus (without extension) suffices for some abstract protocols; the spi calculus enables us to consider cryptographic issues in more detail. We represent protocols as processes in the spi calculus and state their security properties in terms of coarse-grained notions of protocol equivalence.