Analysis of E-commerce Protocols: Adapting a Traditional Technique

We present the adaptation of our model for the validation of key distribution and authentication protocols to address some of the specific needs of protocols for electronic commerce. The two models defer in both the threat scenario and in the protocol formalization. We demonstrate the suitability of our adaptation by analyzing a specific version of the Internet Billing Server protocol introduced by Carnegie MellonUniversity. Our analysis shows that, while the security properties a key distribution or authentication protocol shall provide are well understood, it is often not clear which properties an electronic commerce protocol can or shall provide. We use the automatic theorem proving software ‘‘Otter’’ developed at Argonne National Laboratories for state space exploration.