Using State Space Exploration and a Natural Deduction Style Message Derivation Engine to Verify Security Protocols

Abstract

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.

Natural Deduction Calculus for Computation Tree Logic

“…We believe that being equipped with the goal-directed searching procedure, based on our previous developments [5], our technique opens broad prospects for the application of the method even in wider areas of AI and computer science, most notably, in agent engineering [13]. One of the interesting ideas of such applications of natural deduction can be found, for example, in [7]. Here the authors define a framework to reason about security protocols, and showed how the classical natural deduction system can be used as an engine for constructing valid messages.…”

Verification of Mondex electronic purses with KIV: from transactions to a security protocol

“…In the area of tool-supported protocol verification fully-automated verification using model-checking is dominating (see e.g. [Low96], [MCJ97], [CJM98], [Zar98], [BMV03], [SBP01]), but these are usually limited to standard properties like authenticity and secrecy (but see T. Ramananandro's work with Alloy in this issue). The security properties of the Mondex case study are application-specific and quite different from those standard properties.…”

Athena: a novel approach to efficient automatic security protocol analysis1

“…Previous automatic tools for security protocol analysis include general-purpose model checkers such as FDR [18,15] and Mur [26], and special-purpose model checkers, for example, the Interrogator [25] and Brutus [10]. These tools start with an initial state of a protocol execution and then exhaustively search through all possible sequences of actions of both legitimate principals and a modeled attacker to see whether an attack could happen.…”