Deciding knowledge in security protocols under equational theories

The analysis of security protocols requires precise formulations of the knowledge of protocol participants and attackers. In formal approaches, this knowledge is often treated in terms of message deducibility and indistinguishability relations. In this paper we study the decidability of these two relations. The messages in question may employ functions (encryption, decryption, etc.) axiomatized in an equational theory. One of our main positive results says that deducibility and indistinguishability are both decidable in polynomial time for a large class of equational theories. This class of equational theories is defined syntactically and includes, for example, theories for encryption, decryption, and digital signatures. We also establish general decidability theorems for an even larger class of theories. These theorems require only loose, abstract conditions, and apply to many other useful theories, for example with blind digital signatures, homomorphic encryption, XOR, and other associative–commutative functions.