Athena: a novel approach to efficient automatic security protocol analysis1

Abstract

We propose a new efficient automatic verification technique, Athena, for security protocol analysis. It uses a new efficient representation -our extension to the Strand Space Model, and utilizes techniques from both model checking and theorem proving approaches. Athena is fully automatic and is able to prove the correctness of many security protocols with arbitrary number of concurrent runs. The run time for a typical protocol from the literature, like the Needham-Schroeder protocol, is often a fraction of a second.Athena exploits several different techniques that enable it to analyze infinite sets of protocol runs and achieve such efficiency. Our extended Strand Space Model is a natural and efficient representation for the problem domain. The security properties are specified in a simple logic which permits both efficient proof search algorithms and has enough expressive power to specify interesting properties. The automatic proof search procedure borrows some efficient techniques from both model checking and theorem proving. We believe that it is the right combination of the new compact representation and all the techniques that actually makes Athena successful in fast and automatic verification of security protocols.

OFMC: A symbolic model checker for security protocols

“…A wide variety of model-checking approaches have been developed for analyzing security protocols, e.g. [1,12,28,41,43,48,49]. The key challenge they face is that the general security problem is undecidable [29], and even semialgorithms, focused on falsification, must come to terms with the enormous branching factor in the search space resulting from using the standard Dolev-Yao intruder model, where the intruder can say infinitely many different things at any time point.…”

Abstract interpretation of temporal concurrent constraint programs

“…Here we follow the approach of restricting the number of states to be considered in the verification of the protocol, as for instance in (Escobar et al 2011;Song et al 2001;Armando and Compagna 2008). Roughly, we shall cut the messages generated of length greater than a given κ, thus allowing us to model a bounded version of the attacker.…”

On the Development and Formalization of an Extensible Code Generator for Real Life Security Protocols

“…Like the large majority of similar tools before it [18,20,21,[23][24][25], Expi2Java targets the Java programming language. This has many pragmatic advantages for building a usable and secure tool: from type and memory safety, an extensive standard library and the cryptographic service provider architecture, to the ease of integrating the generated code into existing applications.…”