Automated Analysis of Security Protocols with Global State
Steve Kremer and Robert Künnemann. Automated Analysis of Security Protocols with Global State. In Proceedings of the 35th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P'14), pp. 163–178, IEEE Computer Society Press, San Jose, CA, USA, May 2014.
doi:10.1109/SP.2014.18
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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.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{KK-sp14,
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.\par 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.},
address = {San Jose, CA, USA},
author = {Kremer, Steve and K{\"u}nnemann, Robert},
booktitle = {{P}roceedings of the 35th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S\&P'14)},
DOI = {10.1109/SP.2014.18},
month = may,
pages = {163--178},
publisher = {{IEEE} Computer Society Press},
title = {Automated Analysis of Security Protocols with Global State},
year = {2014},
acronym = {{S\&P}'14},
nmonth = {5},
url = {https://members.loria.fr/skremer/files/Papers/KK-sp14.pdf},
}