Completeness of Discovery Protocols

Tunnel-complex protocols construct topologies of security tunnels by directing tunnel-establishment protocols to set up pair-wise tunnels, where the resulting collection of tunnels achieves an overall security objective. Such protocols ease the burden on network managers, but their design exhibits subtleties relating to functional correctness that can benefit from formal analysis. A class of tunnel-complex protocols that are of special interest are discovery protocols that discover security gateways and set up tunnels to negotiate their traversal by delivering the requisite credentials to satisfy the policies at security gateways on the dataflow path. This paper presents a case study of a discovery protocol that sets up a concatenated sequence of tunnels.