Features of a visualization tool for specification and analysis of security protocol

Abstract

Visualization tools can be an effective and entertaining means to teach students concepts in the class room. Providing accessibility to the tools allows motivated students to interact "live" with visualizations. Security protocols are an important concept in teaching information and network security. Students need to understand both the sequence of passed information, computations and analysis. In this paper, we propose an animated interactive visualization tool for teaching undergraduate students security protocols (design and analysis of authentication protocols). The student can play the animation to see the protocol in action. They can also realize and define the protocol problems by using an interactive (animation) analyzer, included within the tool, to determine the exact invalid section of the running protocol.