A logical reconstruction of SPKI
Abstract
SPKI/SDSI is a proposed public key infrastructure standard that incorporates the SDSI public key infrastructure. SDSI's key innovation was the use of local names. We previously introduced a Logic of Local Name Containment that has a clear semantics and was shown to completely characterize SDSI name resolution. Here we show how our earlier approach can be extended to deal with a number of key features of SPKI, including revocation, expiry dates, and tuple reduction. We show that these extensions add relatively little complexity to the logic. In particular, we do not need a nonmonotonic logic to capture revocation. We then use our semantics to examine SPKI's tuple reduction rules. Our analysis highlights places where SPKI's informal description of tuple reduction is somewhat vague, and shows that extra reduction rules are necessary in order to capture general information about binding and authorization.
Cite
@article{arxiv.cs/0208028,
title = {A logical reconstruction of SPKI},
author = {Joseph Y. Halpern and Ron van der Meyden},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:cs/0208028},
year = {2007}
}
Comments
This is an updated version of a paper that appears in the Proceedings of the 14th IEEE Computer Security Foundations Workshop. It will appear in a special issue of the Journal of Computer Security devoted to papers from that conference