Operational and Epistemic Approaches to Protocol Analysis: Bridging the Gap

Operational models of protocols, on one hand, are readable and conveniently match their implementation, at a certain abstraction level. Epistemic models, on the other hand, are appropriate for specifying knowledge-related properties such as anonymity. These two approaches to specification and analysis have so far developed in parallel and one has either to define ad hoc correctness criteria for the operational model or use complicated epistemic models to specify the operational behavior. We work towards bridging this gap by proposing a combined framework which allows modeling the behavior of a protocol in a process language with an operational semantics and supports reasoning about properties expressed in a rich logic with temporal and epistemic operators.