Statistical Epistemic Logic

We introduce a modal logic for describing statistical knowledge, which we call statistical epistemic logic. We propose a Kripke model dealing with probability distributions and stochastic assignments, and show a stochastic semantics for the logic. To our knowledge, this is the first semantics for modal logic that can express the statistical knowledge dependent on non-deterministic inputs and the statistical significance of observed results. By using statistical epistemic logic, we express a notion of statistical secrecy with a confidence level. We also show that this logic is useful to formalize statistical hypothesis testing and differential privacy in a simple and abstract manner

An Epistemic Approach to Coercion-Resistance for Electronic Voting Protocols

Coercion resistance is an important and one of the most intricate security requirements of electronic voting protocols. Several definitions of coercion resistance have been proposed in the literature, including definitions based on symbolic models. However, existing definitions in such models are rather restricted in their scope and quite complex. In this paper, we therefore propose a new definition of coercion resistance in a symbolic setting, based on an epistemic approach. Our definition is relatively simple and intuitive. It allows for a fine-grained formulation of coercion resistance and can be stated independently of a specific, symbolic protocol and adversary model. As a proof of concept, we apply our definition to three voting protocols. In particular, we carry out the first rigorous analysis of the recently proposed Civitas system. We precisely identify those conditions under which this system guarantees coercion resistance or fails to be coercion resistant. We also analyze protocols proposed by Lee et al. and Okamoto.Comment: An extended version of a paper from IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P) 200

Reconciling operational and epistemic approaches to the formal analysis of crypto-based security protocols

We propose a unifying framework for formal specification and verification of both epistemic and behavioral aspects of security protocols. The main novelty of the proposed framework is the explicit support for cryptographic constructs, which is among the most essential ingredients of security protocols. Due to this feature, the indistinguishability relation for the epistemic constructs gets a dynamic semantics by taking the communicated keys and cryptographic terms in the operational specification into account

Expressing Receipt-Freeness and Coercion-Resistance in Logics of Strategic Ability: Preliminary Attempt

ABSTRACT Voting is a mechanism of utmost importance to social processes. In this paper, we focus on the strategic aspect of information security in voting procedures. We argue that the notions of receipt-freeness and coercion resistance are underpinned by existence (or nonexistence) of a suitable strategy for some participants of the voting process. In order to back the argument formally, we provide logical "transcriptions" of the informal intuitions behind coercion-related properties that can be found in the existing literature. The transcriptions are formulated in the modal game logic ATL * , well known in the area of multi-agent systems