Authentication Primitives for Protocol Specifications

We advocate here the use of two authentication primitives we recently propose in a calculus for distributed systems, as a further instrument for programmers interested in authentication. These primitives offer a way of abstracting from various specifications of authentication and obtaining idealized protocols “secure by construction”. We can consequently prove that a cryptographic protocol is the correct implementation of the corresponding abstract protocol; when the proof fails, reasoning on the abstract specification may drive to the correct implementation.