Hubert Comon-Lundh received the LICS Test-of-Time Award 2023 for the article Intruder Deductions, Constraint Solving and Insecurity Decision in Presence of Exclusive Or (ArXiv preprint) co-authored with Vitaly Shmatikov (SRI International). The award was shared with the related paper An NP Decision Procedure for Protocol Insecurity with XOR by Yannick Chevalier, Ralf Küsters, Michaël Rusinowitch, and Mathieu Turuani.
Cryptographic protocols rely on cryptographic primitives to achieve goals such as data privacy and data authenticity in the presence of an attacker. Their use in important applications such as communications over the Internet or credit card payments calls for the automated verification of their security. These two papers made important progress on algorithmic aspects of protocol verification with additional operators, including XOR which is widely used in real-life applications.Specifically, these papers establish the decidability of insecurity of cryptographic protocols with XOR and other equational theories. Chevalier et al. prove membership in NP when restricted to XOR, while Comon and Shmatikov prove decidability in a broader setting. In addition to definitively settling the complexity question for these cases, the lasting value of this line of work is demonstrated by mature verification tools such as ProVerif, Tamarin, Maude-NPA, and CPSA.— Jury Laudation
The LICS — Logic in Computer Science conference is the most prestigious annual forum on theoretical and practical topics in computer science related to logic in a broad sense. The LICS Test-of-Time Award recognises a small number of papers from the LICS proceedings over the past 20 years (i.e., the paper in question dates from LICS 2002 and was considered this year) that have best stood the "test of time." In selecting these papers, the award committee considers the influence they have had since their publication; due to the fundamental nature of LICS work, the impact is often not felt immediately, hence the 20-year perspective.
The award was presented at the awards session of the conference LICS 2023 held in Boston, USA.
Photo credit: Hubert Common-Lundh — Dietmar Berwanger / CC BY-SA 4.0