Secure group communication protocols have been designed to meet needs such as secure management of group membership, confidential group communication, and access control. New languages and models are necessary to appropriately capture the concepts of such protocols and make them amenable to formal analysis. For this purpose, we developed MuCAPSL (Multicast Common Authentication Protocol Specification Language). In this paper we introduce the MuCAPSL features and motivate our design decisions by illustrating the practical use of MuCAPSL with the help of a simplified version of the secure group communication protocol used in SecureSpread. We also briefly introduce MuCAPSL’s intermediate language MuCIL which serves as an interface language for analysis tools.
Jonathan K. Millen, Grit Denker