Secure Refinements of Communication Channels

It is a common practice to design a protocol (say Q) assuming some secure channels. Then the secure channels are implemented using any standard protocol, e.g. TLS. In this paper, we study when such a practice is indeed secure. We provide a characterization of both confidential and authenticated channels. As an application, we study several protocols of the literature including TLS and BAC protocols. Thanks to our result, we can consider a larger number of sessions when analyzing complex protocols resulting from explicit implementation of the secure channels of some more abstract protocol Q.