Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in
Book cover

SEFM 2015 Collocated Workshops

SEFM 2015: Software Engineering and Formal Methods pp 53–68Cite as

Verifying Protocol Implementations by Augmenting Existing Cryptographic Libraries with Specifications

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 9276))

Abstract

Specifying correct cryptographic protocols has proven to be a difficult task. The implementation of such a protocol in a lower-level programming language introduces additional room for errors. While a lot of work has been done for proving the correctness of high-level (often non-executable) protocol specifications, methodologies to prove properties of protocol implementations in a lower-level language are less well-studied. Such languages however, like the C programming language, are still frequently used to write cryptographic software. We propose a static verification approach for cryptographic protocol implementations written in the C programming language. This approach employs our own extended symbolic model of cryptography which we formalized in VeriFast, a separation logic-based verifier for C programs. By giving formal contracts to the primitives of an existing cryptographic library (i.e. PolarSSL), we were able to prove, besides memory safety, interesting security properties of a small protocol suite thatdemonstrates the usage of those primitives.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.

Chapter
USD   29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD   39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD   54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Learn about institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    We use this term not only for cyphertexts, but for any value generated by some cryptographic primitive.

  2. 2.

    Note: p(?x) is VeriFast syntax for \(\exists x.p(x)\).

  3. 3.

    Events are called event predicates in other approaches, but we call them events here to avoid confusion with separation logic predicates.

References

  1. Almeida, J.B., Barbosa, M., Barthe, G., Dupressoir, F.: Certified computer-aided cryptography: efficient provably secure machine code from high-level implementations. In: Proceedings of the 2013 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security, CCS 2013, pp. 1217–1230, ACM, New York (2013)

    Google Scholar 

  2. Barthe, G., Grégoire, B., Heraud, S., Béguelin, S.Z.: Computer-aided security proofs for the working cryptographer. In: Rogaway, P. (ed.) CRYPTO 2011. LNCS, vol. 6841, pp. 71–90. Springer, Heidelberg (2011)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  3. Bhargavan, K., Fournet, C., Corin, R., Zălinescu, E.: Verified cryptographic implementations for TLS. ACM Trans. Inf. Syst. Secur. 15(1), 3:1–3:32 (2012)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. Bhargavan, K., Fournet, C., Gordon, A.D.: Modular verification of security protocol code by typing. In: 37th ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL 2010), pp. 445–456 (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  5. Blanchet, B.: An efficient cryptographic protocol verifier based on prolog rules. In: 14th IEEE Computer Security Foundations Workshop (CSFW-14), pp. 82–96. IEEE Computer Society Press (2001)

    Google Scholar 

  6. Blanchet, B.: A computationally sound mechanized prover for security protocols. In: IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, pp. 140–154 (2006)

    Google Scholar 

  7. Cohen, E., Dahlweid, M., Hillebrand, M., Leinenbach, D., Moskal, M., Santen, T., Schulte, W., Tobies, S.: VCC: a practical system for verifying concurrent C. In: Berghofer, S., Nipkow, T., Urban, C., Wenzel, M. (eds.) TPHOLs 2009. LNCS, vol. 5674, pp. 23–42. Springer, Heidelberg (2009)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  8. Denning, D.E., Sacco, G.M.: Timestamps in key distribution protocols. Commun. ACM 24(8), 533–536 (1981)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  9. Dolev, D., Yao, A.C.: On the security of public key protocols. Technical report, Stanford, CA, USA (1981)

    Google Scholar 

  10. Dupressoir, F., Gordon, A.D., Jurjens, J., Naumann, D.A.: Guiding a general-purpose C verifier to prove cryptographic protocols. In: Proceedings of the 2011 IEEE 24th Computer Security Foundations Symposium, CSF 2011, pp. 3–17. IEEE Computer Society Washington, DC (2011)

    Google Scholar 

  11. Fournet, C., Kohlweiss, M., Strub, P.-Y.: Modular code-based cryptographic verification. In: Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, CCS 2011, pp. 341–350. ACM, New York (2011)

    Google Scholar 

  12. Jacobs, B., Smans, J., Philippaerts, P., Vogels, F., Penninckx, W., Piessens, F.: VeriFast: a powerful, sound, predictable, fast verifier for C and java. In: Bobaru, M., Havelund, K., Holzmann, G.J., Joshi, R. (eds.) NFM 2011. LNCS, vol. 6617, pp. 41–55. Springer, Heidelberg (2011)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  13. Küsters, R., Truderung, T., Graf, J.: A framework for the cryptographic verification of java-like programs. In: IEEE Computer Security Foundations Symposium, CSF 2012, pp. 198–212. IEEE Computer Society (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  14. Lowe, G.: An attack on the needham-schroeder public-key authentication protocol. Inf. Process. Lett. 56(3), 131–133 (1995)

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  15. Needham, R.M., Schroeder, M.D.: Using encryption for authentication in large networks of computers. Commun. ACM 21(12), 993–999 (1978)

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  16. Paulson, L.C.: The inductive approach to verifying cryptographic protocols. J. Comput. Secur. 6(1–2), 85–128 (1998)

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme [FP7/2007–2013] under grant agreement n317753, and more precisely from the EU FP7 project STANCE (a Source code analysis Toolbox for software security AssuraNCE).

This research is also partially funded by the Research Fund KU Leuven, and by the EU FP7 project NESSoS. With the financial support from the Prevention of and Fight against Crime Programme of the European Union (B-CCENTRE).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. iMinds-DistriNet, KU Leuven, 3001, Leuven, Belgium

    Gijs Vanspauwen & Bart Jacobs

Authors
  1. Gijs Vanspauwen
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Bart Jacobs
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Gijs Vanspauwen .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of York, York, United Kingdom

    Radu Calinescu

  2. Software Engineering, Department of Computer Science, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany

    Bernhard Rumpe

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2015 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

About this paper

Cite this paper

Vanspauwen, G., Jacobs, B. (2015). Verifying Protocol Implementations by Augmenting Existing Cryptographic Libraries with Specifications. In: Calinescu, R., Rumpe, B. (eds) Software Engineering and Formal Methods. SEFM 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9276. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22969-0_4

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22969-0_4

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-22968-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-22969-0

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation