Looking for Diamonds in the Desert - Extending Automatic Protocol Generation to Three-Party Authentication and Key Agreement Protocols

The current process of designing a security protocol is usually ad-hoc and involves little formalism and mechanical assistance. Such a design process is not only slow but also error-prone. Evidence shows that even when security protocols are designed with care and examined intensely,they can still be fundamentally flawed. A classic example is the Needham-Schroeder public-key mutual authentication protocol, in which Gavin Lowe discovered a flaw 18 years later. Due to the lack of formalism and mechanical assistance, manually designed protocols often contain undocumented assumptions and hence can lead to implementation errors.