An Environment for the Specification And Verification of Time-Dependent Security Protocols

The use of formal methods in software engineering for the specification and the verification is suitable when developing complex systems. The distributed nature, the subtle time dependence and the strict requirements of time sensitive security protocols increase the inherent complexity of their validation. Using the TESLA authentication protocol as a case study, we shall discuss what are the functionalities that a verification environment should have to model and verify successfully a time-dependent security protocol and our environment which employs THLPSL as the modelling language and the UPPAAL model checker as the verification engine.