Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2007/102

On the Role of Scheduling in Simulation-Based Security

Ran Canetti and Ling Cheung and Nancy Lynch and Olivier Pereira

Abstract: In a series of papers, K\"usters et al. investigated the relationships between various notions of simulation-based security. Two main factors, the placement of a ``master process'' and the existence of ``forwarder processes'', were found to affect the relationship between different definitions. In this extended abstract, we add a new dimension to the analysis of simulation-based security, namely, the scheduling of concurrent processes. We show that, when we move from sequential scheduling (as used in previous studies) to task-based nondeterministic scheduling, the same syntactic definition of security gives rise to incomparable semantic notions of security. Under task-based scheduling, the hierarchy based on placement of ``master process'' is no longer relevant, because no such designation is necessary to obtain meaningful runs of a system. On the other hand, the existence of ``forwarder processes'' remains an important factor.

Category / Keywords: foundations / simulation-based security, sequential and non-sequential scheduling

Publication Info: Presented at WITS'07

Date: received 21 Mar 2007

Contact author: lcheung at theory csail mit edu

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Version: 20070322:142955 (All versions of this report)

Short URL: ia.cr/2007/102

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