Dealing with inconsistent secure messages by weighting majority

Messages transmitted between senders and receivers might be inconsistent owing to potential communication block, message lost and/or malicious attacks, in electronic commerce. And current formal methods for security protocol analysis show limitations in handling the incoherent secure messages that may be derived from different sources or at different moments. This results in increasing risk of e-commerce activities. This paper thus proposes a formal framework to deal with the inconsistency in secure messages by weighting majority. The freshness and dynamics properties of secure messages are considered and a reliability function is developed to measure the belief in secure messages. This helps us verify protocols in an intuitive way and guarantees correct verification results. The experimental results demonstrate our method is useful in secure protocol analysis.