SRC Research Report 125

Prudent Engineering Practice for Cryptographic Protocols

Martin Abadi and Roger Needham

We present principles for designing cryptographic protocols. The principles are neither necessary nor sufficient for correctness. They are however helpful, in that adherence to them would have prevented a number of published errors.

Our principles are informal guidelines; they complement formal methods, but do not assume them. In order to demonstrate the actual applicability of these guidelines, we discuss some instructive examples from the literature.

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