Critical perspectives on provable security: Fifteen years of "another look" papers

Koblitz, Neal; Menezes, Alfred

doi:10.3934/amc.2019034

Cited by 8 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 152 publications

(250 reference statements)

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“…The Needham-Schroeder protocol, formalized in 1989 [64], was shown to be broken seven years later using an automated tool [65]. In the years since, many attacks have been discovered against formally proven protocol schemes [66], [67]. Koblitz and Menezes [67] list multiple reasons why proofs can go wrong, some of which, such as implicit and incorrect assumptions, also appeared in our case study.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 76%

“…In the years since, many attacks have been discovered against formally proven protocol schemes [66], [67]. Koblitz and Menezes [67] list multiple reasons why proofs can go wrong, some of which, such as implicit and incorrect assumptions, also appeared in our case study. Other papers, like the KRACK attacks [68] show how protocol implementations deviating from the formal descriptions can enable attacks, while pen-and-paper security proofs have been described as "alarmingly fragile" [69].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 92%

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Mind the Gap: Studying the Insecurity of Provably Secure Embedded Trusted Execution Architectures

Bognar

Bulck

Piessens

2022

2022 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP)

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The security claims of a system can be supported or refuted by different kinds of evidence. On the one hand, attack research uses empirical, experimental, inductive methods to refute security claims. If motivated and competent attackers do not succeed in breaking a specific security property, this provides some support (but no definite proof) that the system is secure.On the other hand, formal methods use mathematical, deductive methods that can prove the security of a model of the system. The process of constructing a proof can uncover vulnerabilities that can then be fixed. The use of formal methods can be very powerful and is attractive because it seems to provide irrefutable evidence of security. However, that evidence applies only to the mathematical model, not to any actual system, and, hence, it is important to understand the gap between the model and the real-world system.In this paper, we present a case study that examines this gap for two embedded security architectures that use formal methods to prove their security properties. Despite strong formal evidence for security, we discover numerous attacks against the implementations, all of which falsify proven security properties. These attacks range from exploiting simple programming errors to a novel DMA-based side-channel attack. The simple attacks demonstrate that the construction of systems and proofs is errorprone, while some of the more sophisticated attacks serve as examples to show that formal methods alone can never guarantee the security of a real-world system.From our case study, we also distill actionable guidelines on how to provide stronger evidence for the security of a system.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 76%

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 92%

Mind the Gap: Studying the Insecurity of Provably Secure Embedded Trusted Execution Architectures

Bognar

Bulck

Piessens

2022

2022 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP)

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Another Look at Some Isogeny Hardness Assumptions

Merz

Minko

Petit

2020

Topics in Cryptology – CT-RSA 2020

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The security proofs for isogeny-based undeniable signature schemes have been based primarily on the assumptions that the One-Sided Modified SSCDH problem and the One-More SSCDH problem are intractable. We challenge the validity of these assumptions, showing that both the decisional and computational variants of these problems can be solved in polynomial time. We further demonstrate an attack, applicable to two undeniable signature schemes, one of which was proposed at PQCrypto 2014. The attack allows to forge signatures in 2 4λ/5 steps on a classical computer. This is an improvement over the expected classical security of 2 λ , where λ denotes the chosen security parameter.

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Tight and Optimal Reductions for Signatures Based on Average Trapdoor Preimage Sampleable Functions and Applications to Code-Based Signatures

Chailloux

Debris-Alazard

2020

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

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Critical perspectives on provable security: Fifteen years of "another look" papers

Abstract: We give an overview of our critiques of "proofs" of security and a guide to our papers on the subject that have appeared over the past decade and a half. We also provide numerous additional examples and a few updates and errata.

Cited by 8 publications

References 152 publications

Mind the Gap: Studying the Insecurity of Provably Secure Embedded Trusted Execution Architectures

Mind the Gap: Studying the Insecurity of Provably Secure Embedded Trusted Execution Architectures

Another Look at Some Isogeny Hardness Assumptions

Tight and Optimal Reductions for Signatures Based on Average Trapdoor Preimage Sampleable Functions and Applications to Code-Based Signatures

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