A Top-Down Look at a Secure Message

In ongoing work, we are investigating the design of secure distributed implementations of high-level process calculi (in particular, of the join-calculus). We formulate implementations as translations to lower-level languages with cryptographic primitives. Cryptographic protocols are essential components of those translations. In this paper we discuss basic cryptographic protocols for transmitting a single datum from one site to another. We explain some sufficient correctness conditions for these protocols. As an example, we present a simple protocol and a proof of its correctness.