Understanding the intruder through attacks on cryptographic protocols

Abstract

The vulnerability and importance of computers, robots, internet etc, demand the employment of exceedingly reliable methods in the design of secure systems. Security protocols are one of the most important design parameters. History has proven security protocols to be vulnerable even after they enjoyed circumspect design and meticulous review by experts. We posit that understanding the subtle issues in security protocols is important when designing a protocol. In particular, understanding a penetrator and the knowledge of different attack strategies that a penetrator can apply are among the most important issues that affect the design of security protocols. We describe the notion of a penetrator and specify his characteristics. Our purpose is to emphasize the design criteria of an authentication protocol through the use of some nice and subtle attacks that existed in the literature in the field of the design of security protocols.