Mining inconsistent secure messages toward analyzing security protocols

Traditional approaches such as theorem proving and model checking have been successfully used to analyze security protocols. Ideally, they assume the data communication is reliable and require the user to predetermine authentication goals. However, missing and inconsistent data have been greatly ignored, and the increasingly complicated security protocol makes it difficult to predefine such goals. This paper presents a novel approach to analyze security protocols using association rule mining. It is able to not only validate the reliability of transactions but also discover potential correlations between secure messages. The algorithm and experiment demonstrate that our approaches are useful and promising.