Conclusion and Future Works

Abstract

In this book, we have given a brief history and survey of the state of the art in the field of the formal methods of security protocol analysis and presented many potential directions in which it could be extended. The history of the application of formal methods to security protocol analysis spans over twenty years, dating back to the 1980s. In recent years, these methods have been showing their maturity and consolidation. A number of specialized or general-purpose tools have been developed and applied to realistic protocols, in many cases providing feedbacks to protocol designers that can be used to enhance the protocol’s security. Nonetheless, we have to acknowledge that some new challenges, such as new and complex applications of the protocol and new types of threats, bring forward new requirements to existing protocol analysis. Any attempts to develop a method to ensure correctness of protocols must taken them into account. These remain some critical issues that need to be explored for improving the protocol’s performance.

In this chapter these issues are outlined as emerging trends to be seen and possible future problems to be solved. In Section 8.1, we give a brief summary to the previous eight chapters. In Section 8.2, we describe some of the emerging research areas and challenging problems in protocol analysis.