Modeling Kerberos Authentication Protocol Using Colored Petri Net

Information security is essential in today's digital world and plays an important role in message exchanges and trading. Authentication protocols play a major role in security of communication systems. Kerberos is one of the important and widely used authentication protocols. Widespread and sensitivity use of this protocol makes attention of many researchers for formal modeling and analyzing properties of this protocol. Colored Petri net is powerful formal modeling language with great modeling capabilities and is a suitable for modeling and verification of various systems specially security protocols. In this paper, modeling of Kerberos version 5 authentication protocol using colored Petri net and CPN Tools is presented. Detailed model of operations and messages of Kerberos is presented in this paper that model can be extended easily for studying different properties of this protocol and its strength against various attacks.