A Search-Based Framework for Security Protocol Synthesis

Security protocol verification has been the area where the bulk of the research in cryptographic protocols has taken place and a number of successful supporting tools have been developed. However, not much research has been done in the area of applying formal methods to the design of cryptographic protocols in the first place, despite wide recognition that the design of cryptographic protocols is very difficult. Most existing protocols have been designed using informal methods and heavily rely on the verification process to pick up vulnerabilities. The research reported in this thesis shows how to automatically synthesise abstract protocols using heuristic search, explains how to add high-level efficiency concerns to the synthesis, and demonstrates how to refine the abstract protocols to executable Java Code.