Formal privacy analysis of communication protocols for identity management

Abstract

Over the years, formal methods have been developed for the analysis of security and privacy aspects of communication in IT systems. However, existing methods are insufficient to deal with privacy, especially in identity management (IdM), as they fail to take into account whether personal information can be linked to its data subject. In this paper, we propose a general formal method to analyze privacy of communication protocols for IdM. To express privacy, we represent knowledge of personal information in a three-layer model. We show how to deduce knowledge from observed messages and how to verify a range of privacy properties. We validate the approach by applying it to an IdM case study. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.