Automated verification of a key management architecture for hierarchical group protocols

Emerging applications require secure group communications involving hierarchical architecture protocols. Designing such secure hierarchical protocols is not straightforward, and their verification becomes a major issue in order to avoid any possible security attack and vulnerability. Several attempts have been made to deal with formal verification of group protocols, but to our knowledge, none of them did address the security of hierarchical ones. In this paper, we present the specific challenges and security issues of hierarchical secure group communications, and the work we did for their verification. We show how the AtSe back-end of the AVISPA tool was used to verify one of these protocols.