Mobile values, new names, and secure communication

Abstract

We study the interaction of the "new" construct with a rich but common form of (first-order) communication. This interaction is crucial in security protocols, which are the main motivating examples for our work; it also appears in other programming-language contexts. Specifically, we introduce a simple, general extension of the pi calculus with value passing, primitive functions, and equations among terms. We develop semantics and proof techniques for this extended language and apply them in reasoning about some security protocols.