A BRICS Mini-Course
March 2, 4, 9 and 11, 1999
Lectures by
Sanjiva Prasad
IIT (Indian Institute of Technology), Delhi, India, and BRICS, University of Aarhus, Denmark
With the growth of the internet, and communication between distributed sites, security and privacy are ``hot'' topics. A class of protocols, called authentication protocols, are used to establish (with cryptography) secure communication channels between distributed agents. We will study some approaches to specifying and modelling such protocols, and to establish their correctness, assuming perfect cryptography. The focus of our treatment will be on process calculus approaches and general theorem-proving techniques, as opposed to belief logics and logic programming approaches. A working knowledge of the pi-calculus will be assumed.
Sanjiva Prasad received his PhD from SUNY, Stony Brook in 1991. His thesis, Towards a symmetric integration of concurrent and functional programming explored issues in the design of higher-order mobile concurrent programming languages. He worked at Odyssey Research Associates, Ithaca, from 1990-92, and then at ECRC, Munich from 1992-94 working on the Facile project, based on his thesis work. Since 1994 he has been an assistant professor at IIT Delhi. His research interests are typed programming languages for mobile, distributed computing; operational concurrency theory; and formal methods for specification and verification. He will be visiting BRICS from August 1998 to April 1999.