Stateful Security Protocol Verification

1998

As more resources are added to computer networks, and as more vendors look to the World Wide Web as a viable marketplace, the importance of being able to restrict access and to insure some kind of acceptable behavior even in the presence of malicious adversaries becomes paramount. Many researchers have proposed the use of security protocols to provide these security guarantees. In this paper, we develop a method of verifying these protocols using a special purpose model checker which executes an exhaustive state space search of a protocol model. Our tool also includes a natural deduction style derivation engine which models the capabilities of the adversary trying to attack the protocol. Because our models are necessarily abstractions, we cannot prove a protocol correct. However, our tool is extremely useful as a debugger. We have used our tool to analyze 14 different authentication protocols, and have found the previously reported attacks for them.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2003

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2005

Security protocols are notoriously difficult to debug. One approach to the automatic verification of security protocols with a bounded set of agents uses logic programming with analysis and synthesis rules to describe how the attacker gains information and constructs new messages. We propose a generic approach to verifying security protocols in Spin. The dynamic process creation mechanism of Spin is used to nondeterministically create different combinations of role instantiations. We incorporate the synthesis and analysis features of the logic programming approach to describe how the intruder learns information and replays it back into the system. We formulate a generic "loss of secrecy" property that is flagged whenever the intruder learns private information from an intercepted message. We also describe a simplification of the Dolev-Yao attacker model that suffices to analyze secrecy properties.

Computing Research Repository, 2011

In recent times, many protocols have been proposed to provide security for various information and communication systems. Such protocols must be tested for their functional correctness before they are used in practice. Application of formal methods for verification of security protocols would enhance their reliability thereby, increasing the usability of systems that employ them. Thus, formal verification of security protocols has become a key issue in computer and communications security. In this paper we present, analyze and compare some prevalent approaches towards verification of secure systems. We follow the notion of -same goal through different approaches -as we formally analyze the Needham Schroeder Public Key protocol for Lowe's attack using each of our presented approaches.

Journal of Systems Architecture, 2011

We propose a novel method to construct user-space internet protocol stacks whose security properties can be formally explored and verified. The proposed method allows construction of protocol stacks using a C++ subset. We define a formal state-transformer representation of protocol stacks in which the protocol stack is specified in terms of three primary operations, which are constructed from sub-operations, in

Rapid development of networks and communications makes security a more and more crucial problem. To provide security for diierent systems, many communication security protocols are proposed. Such protocols must be proved correct before they can be used in practice. Formal veriication techniques are promising methods to verify protocols and have been receiving a lot of attention recently. In this paper, we survey several security protocols and formal veriication techniques to verify the protocols.

Automated formal verification of security protocols has been mostly focused on analyzing highlevel abstract models which, however, are significantly different from real protocol implementations written in programming languages. Recently, some researchers have started investigating techniques that bring automated formal proofs closer to real implementations. This paper surveys these attempts, focusing on approaches that target the application code that implements protocol logic, rather than the libraries that implement cryptography. According to these approaches, libraries are assumed to correctly implement some models. The aim is to derive formal proofs that, under this assumption, give assurance about the application code that implements the protocol logic. The two main approaches of model extraction and code generation are presented, along with the main techniques adopted for each approach.

2003

A second-level security protocol is defined as a security protocol that relies on an underlying security protocol in order to achieve its goals. The verification of classical authentication protocols has become routine, but second-level protocols raise new challenges. These include the formalisation of appeals to the underlying protocols, the modification of the threat model, and the formalisation of the novel goals. These challenges have been met using Isabelle and the Inductive Approach [14]. The outcomes are demonstrated on a recent protocol for certified e-mail delivery by Abadi et al. [2].

Computer Systems: Science & Engineering, 2003

Journal of Advances in Computer Networks, 2018

The design of secure protocols is complex and prone to error. Formal verification is an imperative step in the design of security protocols and provides a rigid and thorough means of evaluating the correctness of security protocols. This paper discusses the process of formal verification using a logic-based technique for detecting protocol weaknesses that are exploitable by freshness and interleaving attacks. This technique is realised as a special purpose logic for attack detection that can be used throughout the design stage, i.e. it subjects a draft of a protocol to formal analysis prior to its publication or deployment. For any detected failure the analysis will also reveal reasons for the weaknesses, facilitating design corrections. A summary of the attack detection logic is presented and its ability to detect weaknesses is demonstrated by applying it to a smart-card based authentication protocol. Further, a prototype implementation of the attack detection logic theory is introduced. An empirical study is presented that assesses the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed automated technique by applying it to a set of protocols, incorporating some with known vulnerabilities and some that are known to be secure. This study confirms the ability of the technique to detect all design weaknesses. Additionally, it establishes the efficiency of the verification technique, in terms of memory requirements (study was carried out on a computing platform of 2GB of RAM) and execution times (milliseconds) required for protocol verification.

Journal of Communications, 2013

Formal verification aims at providing a rigid and thorough means of evaluating the correctness of security protocols and also establishing that the protocols are free of weaknesses that can be exploited by attacks. This paper discusses the process of formal verification using a logic-based verification tool. The verification tool with attack detection capabilities is introduced, and the verification process is demonstrated by way of a case study on two published security protocols that provide mutual authentication using smart cards. The performed verification reveals new weaknesses in the protocols that can be exploited by a replay attack and a parallel session attack. The impact of these attacks is that an attacker is able to masquerade as a legitimate remote user to cheat the system. The reasoning why these attacks are possible is detailed and an amended protocol, resistant to these attacks is proposed. Formal verification of the amended protocol provides confidence in the correctness and effectiveness of the proposed modifications.

1996

Communication protocols pose interesting and difficult challenges for verification technologies. The state spaces of interesting protocols are either infinite or too large for finite-state verification techniques like model checking and state exploration. Theorem proving is also not effective since the formal correctness proofs of these protocols can be long and complicated. We describe a series of protocol verification experiments culminating in a methodology where theorem proving is used to abstract out the sources of unboundedness in the protocol to yield a skeletal protocol that can be verified using model checking. Our experiments focus on the Philips bounded retransmission protocol originally studied by Groote and van de Pol and by Helmink, Sellink, and Vaandrager. First, a scaled-down version of the protocol is analyzed using the Murø state exploration tool as a debugging aid and then translated into the PVS specification language. The PVS verification of the generalized protocol illustrates the difficulty of using theorem proving to verify infinite-state protocols. Some of this difficulty can be overcome by extracting a finite-state abstraction of the protocol that preserves the property of interest while being amenable to model checking. We compare the performance of Murø, SMV, and the PVS model checkers on this reduced protocol.

2012

AnBx is an extension of the Alice & Bob notation for protocol narrations to serve as a specification language for a purely declarative modelling of distributed protocols. AnBx is built around a set of communication and data abstractions which provide primitive support for the high-level security guarantees, and help shield from the details of the underlying cryptographic infrastructure.Being implemented on top of the OFMC verification tool, AnBx serves not only for specification and design, but also for security analysis of distributed protocols. Moreover the framework, keeping apart the protocol logic from the application logic, allow for automatic generation of Java source code of protocols specified in AnBx. We demonstrate the practical effectiveness of our approach with the specification and analysis of two real-life e-payment protocols, obtaining stronger and more scalable security guarantees than those offered by the original ones.In the second part of the thesis we formally analyse the Secure Vehicle Communication system (SeVeCom), using the AIF framework which is based on a novel set-abstraction technique.We report on two new attacks found and verify that under some reasonable assumptions, the system is secure.

1999

Security protocols use cryptography to set up private communication channels on an insecure network. Many protocols contain flaws, and because security goals are seldom specified in detail, we cannot be certain what constitutes a flaw. Thanks to recent work by a number of researchers, security protocols can now be analyzed formally.

Journal of Computer Security, 2005

We perform a systematic expansion of protocol narrations into terms of a process algebra in order to make precise some of the detailed checks that need to be made in a protocol. We then apply static analysis technology to develop an automatic validation procedure for protocols. Finally, we demonstrate that these techniques suffice for identifying a number of authentication flaws in symmetric and asymmetric key protocols such as Needham-Schroeder symmetric key, Otway-Rees, Yahalom, Andrew Secure RPC, Needham-Schroeder asymmetric key, and Beller-Chang-Yacobi MSR.