PhD defense by Naveed Ahmed

Abstract:

Entity authentication is a process of verifying the claimed identity of a network party. It may appear to be a simple goal, but, depending on the application and context, it entails a number of modalities, such as whether the party is currently active on the network and whether the party is willing to communicate. Entity authentication is one of the most elusive security goals, and analysing an authentication protocol is notoriously hard.

To analyse an authentication protocol with greater detail, a new methodology is proposed, which is called the structured intuition (SI).  The SI divides entity authentication into fine level authentication goals (FLAGs). The main idea is to identify cryptographic dependencies between terms in a protocol specification, which give rise to a dependency graph, both at the level of the entire protocol and for each party of the protocol. The local dependency graphs are used to derive binding sequences for each party. A binding sequence consists of those terms that are critical to entity authentication. The binding sequence is then used to derive FLAGs.

Supervisor:

Associate Professor Christian D. Jensen, cdj@imm.dtu.dk, DTU Informatics

Co-supervisor:

Professor Erik Zenner, University of Applied Science, Offenburg

Assessment Committee:

Professor Lars R. Knudsen, DTU

Professor Jason Crampton, Royal Holloway, University of London

Professor Svein Johan Knapskog, Norges Teknisk-Naturvitenska-pelige Universitet

Chairman:

Professor Jens Sparsø, DTU