Modeling and Analysis of Security Protocols Using Role Based Specifications and Petri Nets

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce a framework composed of a syntax and its compositional Petri net semantics, for the specification and verification of properties (like authentication) of security protocols. The protocol agents (e.g., an initiator, a responder, a server, a trusted third party,. . .) are formalized as roles, each of them having a predefined behavior depending on their global and also local knowledge (including for instance public, private and shared keys), and may interact in a potentially hostile environment. The main characteristics of our framework, is that it makes explicit, structured and formal, the usually implicit information necessary to analyse the protocol, for instance the public and private context of execution. The roles and the environment are expressed using SPL processes and compositionally translated into high-level Petri nets, while the context specifying the global and local knowledge of the participants in the protocol is used to generate the corresponding initial marking (with respect to the studied property). Finally, this representation is used to analyse the protocol properties, applying techniques of simulation and modelchecking on Petri nets. The complete approach is illustrated on the case study of the Kao-Chow authentication protocol.

On-the-Fly Trace Generation and Textual Trace Analysis and Their Applications to the Analysis of Cryptographic Protocols

“…Many model checking methods [6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16] have been developed and applied to analyze cryptographic protocols. All of them except for NRL [15] and Proverif [16] can analyze only one attack trace of a found attack.…”

“…In [11,12], Murphi which is a general model checker has also been applied to cryptographic protocols, and it discovered new attacks in some protocols. In [13][14], Petri nets-based model checking methods are employed to analyze cryptographic protocols, and they can detect known attacks only. All of the model checking methods discussed so far can analyze only one attack trace of a found attack.…”

On-the-fly Trace Generation Approach to the Security Analysis of Cryptographic Protocols: Coloured Petri Nets-based Method

“…Bouroulet et al [10] developed a specification language and verification for security protocols. A security protocol and attackers are specified by a language based on process algebra.…”

“…Most Petri nets-based methods [38,26,1,17,10,27] that have been developed to analyze cryptographic protocols provide the analysis of one attack trace only. But, there is one Petri-nets-based method [25] which offers the analysis of multiple attack traces, but it is inefficient.…”

Modelling, verification, and formal analysis of security properties in a P2P system

“…Similar works include the specification and analysis of simpler security protocols using a Petri net semantics of the Security Protocol Language (SPL [4]): [3,2]. SPL is not suitable to model SPREADS' protocol because it lacks features that turned out to be crucial for our modelling: in particular, the ability to model loops and choices in conjunction with the annotation of the model with complex data types and associated functions.…”