Synthesising End-to-End Security Protocols

E-commerce transactions rely on end-to-end protocols to provide security guarantees when messages are sent through intermediaries. If autonomous entities with different security requirements are to collaborate, protocols providing end-to-end security must be synthesized at runtime. However, such an approach is predicated on finding security primitives and ways of expressing interdependencies between semantics and security. The proposed approach defines fine-grained security properties by combining basic properties and enforcing them in a predefined order. The use of standard security properties allows autonomous entities to reason about security requirements. Furthermore, the novel propagation rules defined allow end-to-end security properties to be derived from entity security requirements. By using proven schemes designed to enforce such requirements, this approach allows end-to-end security protocols similar to the SET purchase protocol to be created at runtime.