A Theory of Composable Lingos for Protocol Dialects

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 20 Mar 2026] A Theory of Composable Lingos for Protocol Dialects Víctor García, Santaigo Escobar, Catherine Meadows, Jose Meseguer Formal patterns are formally specified solutions to frequently occurring distributed system problems that are generic, executable, and come with strong qualitative and/or quantitative formal guarantees. A formal pattern is a generic system transformation which transforms a usually infinite class of systems in need of the pattern's solution into enhanced versions of such systems that solve the problem in question. In this paper we demonstrate the application of formal patterns to protocol dialects. Dialects are methods for hardening protocols so as to endow them with light-weight security, especially against easy attacks that can lead to more serious ones. A lingo is a dialect's key security component, because attackers are unable to ''speak'' the lingo. A lingo's ''talk'' changes all the time, becoming a moving target for attackers. In this paper we present several formal patterns for both lingos and dialects. Lingo formal patterns can make lingos stronger by both transforming them and by composing several lingos into a stronger lingo. Dialects themselves can be obtained by the application of a single dialect formal pattern, generic on both the chosen lingo and the chosen protocol. Comments: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2504.20637 Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) Cite as: arXiv:2603.19908 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2603.19908v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.19908 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Víctor García Valero [view email] [v1] Fri, 20 Mar 2026 12:45:19 UTC (281 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-03 Change to browse by: cs References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)