Metareasoning about Security Protocols using Distributed Temporal Logic

We introduce a version of distributed temporal logic for rigorously formalizing and proving metalevel properties of different protocol models, and establishing relationships between models. The resulting logic is quite expressive and provides a natural, intuitive language for formalizing both local (agent specific) and global properties of distributed communicating processes. Through a sequence of examples, we show how this logic may be applied to formalize and establish the correctness of different modeling and simplification techniques, which play a role in building effective protocol tools.