skip to main content
10.1145/1455770.1455787acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagesccsConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

Unbounded verification, falsification, and characterization of security protocols by pattern refinement

Published: 27 October 2008 Publication History

Abstract

We present a new verification algorithm for security protocols that allows for unbounded verification, falsification, and complete characterization. The algorithm provides a number of novel features, including: (1) Guaranteed termination, after which the result is either unbounded correctness, falsification, or bounded correctness. (2) Efficient generation of a finite representation of an infinite set of traces in terms of patterns, also known as a complete characterization. (3) State-of-the-art performance, which has made new types of protocol analysis feasible, such as multi-protocol analysis.

References

[1]
A. Armando and L. Compagna. Sat-based model checking for security protocols analysis. International Journal of Information Security, 7(1):3--32, 2008.
[2]
M. Backes, S. Lorenz, M. Maffei, and K. Pecina. The CASPA tool: Causality--based abstraction for security protocol analysis. In A. Gupta and S. Malik, editors, CAV, volume 5123 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 419--422. Springer, 2008.
[3]
M. Backes, M. Maffei, and A. Cortesi. Causality-based abstraction of multiplicity in security protocols. In Proc. 20th IEEE Computer Security Foundations Symposium (CSF). IEEE Computer Society, June 2007.
[4]
D. Basin, S. Moedersheim, and L. Vigano. OFMC: A symbolic model checker for security protocols. International Journal of Information Security, 4(3):181--208, 2005.
[5]
S. Berezin. Extensions to Athena: Constraint satisfiability problem and new pruning theorems based on type system extensions for messages. http://www.sergeyberezin.com/papers/athena--extensions.ps (unpublished manuscript), 2001.
[6]
B. Blanchet. An Efficient Cryptographic Protocol Verifier Based on Prolog Rules. In Proc. 14th IEEE Computer Security Foundations Workshop (CSFW), pages 82--96, Cape Breton, June 2001. IEEE Computer Society.
[7]
C. Bodei, M. Buchholtz, P. Degano, F. Nielson, and H. Nielson. Static validation of security protocols. Journal of Computer Security, 13(3):347--390, 2005.
[8]
Y. Boichut, P.-C. Heam, O. Kouchnarenko, and F. Oehl. Improvements on the Genet and Klay technique to automatically verify security protocols. In Proc. International Workshop on Automated Verification of Infinite-State Systems (AVIS'2004).
[9]
M. Bugliesi, R. Focardi, and M. Maffei. Authenticity by tagging and typing. In Proc. 2nd ACM Workshop on Formal Methods in Security Engineering (FMSE), pages 1--12. ACM Press, 2004.
[10]
M. Burrows, M. Abadi, and R. Needham. A logic of authentication. ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, 8(1):18--36, 1990.
[11]
R. Corin and S. Etalle. An improved constraint-based system for the verification of security protocols. In Proc. 9th International Static Analysis Symposium (SAS), volume 2477 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 326--341, Spain, Sep 2002. Springer.
[12]
C. Cremers. Feasibility of multi-protocol attacks. In Proc. of The First International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security (ARES), pages 287--294, Vienna, Austria, April 2006. IEEE Computer Society.
[13]
C. Cremers. The Scyther Tool: Verification, falsification, and analysis of security protocols. In Computer Aided Verification, 20th International Conference, CAV 2008, Princeton, USA, Proc., volume 5123/2008 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 414--418. Springer, 2008.
[14]
C. Cremers and P. Lafourcade. Comparing state spaces in automatic protocol verification. In Proc. of the 7th Int. Workshop on Automated Verification of Critical Systems (AVoCS'07), Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science. Elsevier Science Direct, September 2007.
[15]
C. Cremers and S. Mauw. Operational semantics of security protocols. In Scenarios: Models, Transformations and Tools, International Workshop, 2003, Revised Selected Papers, volume 3466 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer, 2005.
[16]
S. Doghmi, J. D. Guttman, and F. Thayer. Skeletons, homomorphisms, and shapes: Characterizing protocol executions. In Proc. of the 23rd Conf. on the Mathematical Foundations of Programming Semantics (MFPS XXIII), volume 173 of Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science, pages 85--102. Elsevier ScienceDirect, April 2007.
[17]
D. Dolev and A. Yao. On the security of public key protocols. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, 29(12):198--208, Mar. 1983.
[18]
N. Durgin, P. Lincoln, J. Mitchell, and A. Scedrov. Undecidability of bounded security protocols. In Proc. of the FLOC'99 Workshop on Formal Methods and Security Protocols (FMSP'99), 1999.
[19]
C. Haack and A. Jeffrey. Pattern-matching spi-calculus. Inf. Comput., 204(8):1195--1263, 2006.
[20]
F. O. P. IST-2001-39252. AVISPA: Automated validation of internet security protocols and applications, 2003.
[21]
G. Lowe. Breaking and fixing the Needham-Schroeder public-key protocol using FDR. In Proc. 2nd International Conference on Tools and Algorithms for the Construction and Analysis of Systems (TACAS), volume 1055 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 147--166. Springer, 1996.
[22]
G. Lowe. Casper: A compiler for the analysis of security protocols. In Proc. 10th IEEE Computer Security Foundations Workshop (CSFW), pages 18--30. IEEE Computer Society, 1997.
[23]
C. Meadows. The NRL protocol analyzer: An overview. Journal of Logic Programming, 26(2):113--131, 1996.
[24]
S. Meier. A formalization of an operational semantics of security protocols. Diploma thesis, ETH Zurich, August 2007. http://people.inf.ethz.ch/meiersi/fossp/index.html.
[25]
J. Millen. A necessarily parallel attack. In Workshop on Formal Methods and Security Protocols, Trento, Italy, 1999.
[26]
L. Paulson. The inductive approach to verifying cryptographic protocols. Journal of Computer Security, 6:85--128, 1998.
[27]
L. Paulson. Inductive analysis of the Internet protocol TLS. ACM Transactions on Information and System Security, 2(3):332--351, Aug. 1999.
[28]
D. Song, S. Berezin, and A. Perrig. Athena: A novel approach to efficient automatic security protocol analysis. Journal of Computer Security, 9(1/2):47--74, 2001.
[29]
Security protocols open repository (SPORE). http://www.lsv.ens-cachan.fr/spore.
[30]
F. Thayer, J. Herzog, and J. Guttman. Strand spaces: Proving security protocols correct. Journal of Computer Security, 7:191--230, 1999.
[31]
M. Turuani. The CL-Atse protocol analyser. In Proc. RTA'06, volume 4098 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 227--286. Springer, Aug. 2006.

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Advancing Security Protocol Verification: A Comparative Study of Scyther, TamarinJournal of Technical Education Science10.54644/jte.2024.152319:1(43-53)Online publication date: 28-Feb-2024
  • (2023)FIDO Gets Verified: A Formal Analysis of the Universal Authentication Framework ProtocolIEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing10.1109/TDSC.2022.321725920:5(4291-4310)Online publication date: 1-Sep-2023
  • (2022)A Formal Analysis of the FIDO2 ProtocolsComputer Security – ESORICS 202210.1007/978-3-031-17143-7_1(3-21)Online publication date: 26-Sep-2022
  • Show More Cited By

Index Terms

  1. Unbounded verification, falsification, and characterization of security protocols by pattern refinement

    Recommendations

    Comments

    Information & Contributors

    Information

    Published In

    cover image ACM Conferences
    CCS '08: Proceedings of the 15th ACM conference on Computer and communications security
    October 2008
    590 pages
    ISBN:9781595938107
    DOI:10.1145/1455770
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

    Sponsors

    Publisher

    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 27 October 2008

    Permissions

    Request permissions for this article.

    Check for updates

    Author Tags

    1. characterization
    2. falsification
    3. security protocol analysis
    4. unbounded verification

    Qualifiers

    • Research-article

    Conference

    CCS08
    Sponsor:

    Acceptance Rates

    CCS '08 Paper Acceptance Rate 51 of 280 submissions, 18%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 1,261 of 6,999 submissions, 18%

    Upcoming Conference

    CCS '25

    Contributors

    Other Metrics

    Bibliometrics & Citations

    Bibliometrics

    Article Metrics

    • Downloads (Last 12 months)10
    • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)1
    Reflects downloads up to 18 Feb 2025

    Other Metrics

    Citations

    Cited By

    View all
    • (2024)Advancing Security Protocol Verification: A Comparative Study of Scyther, TamarinJournal of Technical Education Science10.54644/jte.2024.152319:1(43-53)Online publication date: 28-Feb-2024
    • (2023)FIDO Gets Verified: A Formal Analysis of the Universal Authentication Framework ProtocolIEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing10.1109/TDSC.2022.321725920:5(4291-4310)Online publication date: 1-Sep-2023
    • (2022)A Formal Analysis of the FIDO2 ProtocolsComputer Security – ESORICS 202210.1007/978-3-031-17143-7_1(3-21)Online publication date: 26-Sep-2022
    • (2021)ESSMSecurity and Communication Networks10.1155/2021/82731722021Online publication date: 7-Dec-2021
    • (2021)Practical and Scalable Security Verification of Secure ArchitecturesProceedings of the 10th International Workshop on Hardware and Architectural Support for Security and Privacy10.1145/3505253.3505256(1-9)Online publication date: 18-Oct-2021
    • (2019)A Lightweight Secure Communication Protocol for IoT Devices Using Physically Unclonable FunctionSecurity, Privacy, and Anonymity in Computation, Communication, and Storage10.1007/978-3-030-24907-6_3(26-35)Online publication date: 11-Jul-2019
    • (2018)Formal Analysis of Combinations of Secure ProtocolsFoundations and Practice of Security10.1007/978-3-319-75650-9_4(53-67)Online publication date: 17-Feb-2018
    • (2017)The Applied Pi CalculusJournal of the ACM10.1145/312758665:1(1-41)Online publication date: 26-Oct-2017
    • (2017)Security in Automotive NetworksACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems10.1145/296040722:2(1-27)Online publication date: 13-Mar-2017
    • (2017)Symbolic and Computational Mechanized Verification of the ARINC823 Avionic Protocols2017 IEEE 30th Computer Security Foundations Symposium (CSF)10.1109/CSF.2017.7(68-82)Online publication date: Aug-2017
    • Show More Cited By

    View Options

    Login options

    View options

    PDF

    View or Download as a PDF file.

    PDF

    eReader

    View online with eReader.

    eReader

    Figures

    Tables

    Media

    Share

    Share

    Share this Publication link

    Share on social media