Kant: A Domain-Specific Language for Modeling Security Protocols

Designing a security protocol is a complex process that requires a deep understanding of security principles and best practices. To ensure protocol effectiveness and resilience against attacks, it is important to strengthen security by design by supporting the designer with an easy-to-use, concise, and simple notation to design security protocols in a way that the protocol model could be easily mapped into the input model a verification tool to guarantee security properties. To achieve the goal of developing a DSL language for security protocol design, working as the front-end and easy-to-use language of a formal framework able to support different back-end tools for security protocol analysis, we present the abstract and concrete syntaxes of the Kant (Knowledge ANalysis of Trace) language. We also present a set of validation rules that we have defined to help the designer, already at design time, to avoid common security errors or to warn him/her regarding choices that might lead to protocol vulnerabilities. The effectiveness of Kant’s expressiveness is discussed in terms of a number of case studies where Kant has been used for modeling protocols.