This is AVISPA:

AVISPA aims at developing a push-button, industrial-strength technology for the analysis of large-scale Internet security-sensitive protocols and applications. This technology will speed up the development of the next generation of network protocols, improve their security, and therefore increase the public acceptance of advanced, distributed IT applications based on them.

We at AVISPA will achieve this by advancing specification and deduction technology to the point where industry protocols can be specified and automatically analyzed.

A central aim of the project is then to integrate this technology into a robust automated tool, tuned on practical, large-scale problems, and migrated to standardization bodies, whose protocol designers are in dire need of such tools.

Objectives

  1. to develop a rich specification language for formalizing protocols, security goals, and threat models of industrial complexity
  2. to advance the state-of-the-art in automated deduction techniques to scale up to this complexity
  3. to build a tool based on these techniques that will allow industry and standardization organizations to automatically validate or detect errors in their products
  4. to tune this tool and demonstrate proof-of-concept on a large collection of practically relevant, industrial protocols
  5. to begin the migration of this technology into industry standardization organizations such as the IETF so that both the scientific and the industrial community can benefit from the advances achieved by this project.

Funding

AVISPA is a shared-cost RTD (FET open) project, funded by the European Commission under the Information Society Technologies Programme operating within the Fifth Framework Programme, started on January 1st, 2003. In order to have a look at the European Commission AVISPA home page, please click here.

The AVISS project

AVISS (Automated Validation of Infinite-State Systems) is the assessment project which has paved the way for AVISPA. Started in May, 2001 and lasted for one year, it has proved to be successful and it has boosted the interest both in the topic and in the research group.

AVISPA is the result of the follow-up grant proposal, which was accepted in Summer 2002.

To get an account of what has been done in AVISS, you might want to either have a look at the European Commission AVISS home page (click here and enter AVISS in the search form), or navigate the AVISS website itself.