As more resources are added to computer networks, and as more vendors look to the World Wide Web as a viable marketplace, the importance of being able to restrict access and to insure some kind of acceptable behavior even in the presence of malicious adversaries becomes paramount. Many researchers have proposed the use of security protocols to provide these security guarantees. In this paper, we develop a method of verifying these protocols using a special purpose model checker which executes an exhaustive state space search of a protocol model. Our tool also includes a natural deduction style derivation engine which models the capabilities of the adversary trying to attack the protocol. Because our models are necessarily abstractions, we cannot prove a protocol correct. However, our tool is extremely useful as a debugger. We have used our tool to analyze 14 different authentication protocols, and have found the previously reported attacks for them.
Due to the rapid growth of the "Internet" and the "World Wide Web" security has become a very important concern in the design and implementation of software systems. Since security has become an important issue, the number of protocols in this domain has become very large. These protocols are very diverse in nature. If a software architect wants to deploy some of these protocols in a system, they have to be sure that the protocol has the right properties as dictated by the requirements of the system. In this article we present BRUTUS, a tool for verifying properties of security protocols. This tool can be viewed as a special-purpose model checker for security protocols. We also present reduction techniques that make the tool efficient. Experimental results are provided to demonstrate the efficiency of BRUTUS.
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