Abstract

The analysis of cryptographic protocols is by now a well established application area for formal methods. However, there are many protocols that go beyond the traditional Dolev-Yao model for which these formal methods have been developed. In this talk we examine a particular class of such protocols, distance bounding protocols, designed to authenticate distance measurements in sensor networks. These rely not only on assumptions about the soundness of cryptographic functions, but on physical assumptions about the time of flight of signals. We adapt the authentication logic of Pavlovic, Meadows, and Cervesato to reason about these protocols by incorporating the physical assumptions necessary as axioms and definitions in the system, and apply it to the analysis of a family of distance bounding protocols. We also discuss the potential for adding probabilistic reasoning to the logic to better capture the necessary physical assumptions.