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Automated analysis of security protocols with global state.

Authors :
Kremer, Steve
Künnemann, Robert
Source :
Journal of Computer Security. 2016, Vol. 24 Issue 5, p583-616. 73p.
Publication Year :
2016

Abstract

Security APIs, key servers and protocols that need to keep the status of transactions, require to maintain a global, non-monotonic state, e.g., in the form of a database or register. However, most existing automated verification tools do not support the analysis of such stateful security protocols - sometimes because of fundamental reasons, such as the encoding of the protocol as Horn clauses, which are inherently monotonic. A notable exception is the recent tamarin prover which allows specifying protocols as multiset rewrite (msr) rules, a formalism expressive enough to encode state. As multiset rewriting is a "low-level" specification language with no direct support for concurrent message passing, encoding protocols correctly is a difficult and error-prone process. We propose a process calculus which is a variant of the applied pi calculus with constructs for manipulation of a global state by processes running in parallel. We show that this language can be translated to msr rules whilst preserving all security properties expressible in a dedicated first-order logic for security properties. The translation has been implemented in a prototype tool which uses the tamarin prover as a backend. We apply the tool to several case studies among which a simplified fragment of PKCS#11, the Yubikey security token, and an optimistic contract signing protocol. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Details

Language :
English
ISSN :
0926227X
Volume :
24
Issue :
5
Database :
Academic Search Index
Journal :
Journal of Computer Security
Publication Type :
Academic Journal
Accession number :
120475655
Full Text :
https://doi.org/10.3233/JCS-160556