Primitives for authentication in process algebras

We extend the -calculus and the spi-calculus with two primitives that guarantee authentication. They enable us to abstract from various implementations/specifications of authentication, and to obtain idealized protocols which are “secure by construction”. The main underlying idea, originally proposed in [14] for entity authentication, is to use the locations of processes in order to check who is sending a message (authentication of a party) and who originated a message (message authentication). The theory of local names, developed in [6] for the -calculus, gives us almost for free both the partner authentication and the message authentication primitives.