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International Conference on Research in Security Standardisation

SSR 2015: Security Standardisation Research pp 86–106Cite as

Analysis of the PKCS#11 API Using the Maude-NPA Tool

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 9497))

Abstract

Cryptographic Application Programmer Interfaces (Crypto APIs) are designed to allow a secure interoperation between applications and cryptographic devices such as smartcards and Hardware Security Modules (HSMs). However, several Crypto APIs have been shown to be subject to attacks in which sensitive information is disclosed to an attacker, such as the RSA Laboratories Public Key Standards PKCS#11, an API widely adopted in industry. Recently, there has been a growing interest on applying automated crypto protocol analysis methods to formally analyze APIs. However, the PKCS#11 has been proven difficult to analyze using such methods since it involves non-monotonic mutable global state. In this paper we specify and analyze the PKCS#11 in Maude-NPA, a general purpose crypto protocol analysis tool.

The rights of this work are transferred to the extent transferable according to title 17 U.S.C. 105.

This work has been partially supported by NSF grant CNS 13-19109, by the EU (FEDER) and the Spanish MINECO under grant TIN 2013-45732-C4-1-P, and by Spanish Generalitat Valenciana under grant PROMETEOII/2015/013.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Maude-NPA also checks whether \(NP_i \theta \) satisfies irreducibility constraints, as described in [13].

  2. 2.

    Attacks shown in Figs. 1-4 actually correspond to attacks of PKCS#11 version 2.01, whereas the attack shown in Fig. 5 is an attack discovered for PKCS#11 version 2.20.

  3. 3.

    The thesis in which this work is contained is not publicly available, so we are relying on the account given in [12].

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

    Antonio González-Burgueño

  2. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, USA

    Sonia Santiago & José Meseguer

  3. DSIC-ELP, Universitat Politècnica de València, Valencia, Spain

    Santiago Escobar

  4. Naval Research Laboratory, Washington DC, USA

    Catherine Meadows

Authors
  1. Antonio González-Burgueño
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  2. Sonia Santiago
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  3. Santiago Escobar
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  4. Catherine Meadows
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  5. José Meseguer
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Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Catherine Meadows or José Meseguer .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Hewlett Packard Laboratories, Bristol, United Kingdom

    Liqun Chen

  2. NICT, Tokyo, Japan

    Shin'ichiro Matsuo

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González-Burgueño, A., Santiago, S., Escobar, S., Meadows, C., Meseguer, J. (2015). Analysis of the PKCS#11 API Using the Maude-NPA Tool. In: Chen, L., Matsuo, S. (eds) Security Standardisation Research. SSR 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9497. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27152-1_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27152-1_5

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