Formal Specification Language for Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks

Vehicular Ad-Hoc Network (VANET) is a form of Mobile Ad-Hoc Network (wireless Network), originally used to provide safety & comfort for passengers, & currently being used to establish Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC) among near by Vehicles (V2V Communications) and between vehicles and nearby fixed infrastructure equipments; Roadside equipments (V2I Communications). VANET was used also to warn drivers of collision possibilities, road sign alarms, auto-payment at road tolls and parks. Usually VANET can be found in Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). VANET is the current and near future hot topic for research, that has been targeted by many researchers to develop some applications and protocols specifically for the VANET. But a problem facing all VANET researchers is the unavailability of a formal specification language to specify the VANET systems, protocols, applications and scenarios proposed by those researchers. A specification language is a formal language that is used during the systems design, analysis, and requirements analysis. Using a formal specification language, a researcher can show “What his system does”, Not How. As a contribution of our research we have created a formal specification language for VANET. We made the use of some Romans characters & some basic symbols to represent VANET Systems & Applications. In addition, we have created some combined symbols to represent actions and operations of the VANET system and its participating devices. Our formal specification language covers many of the VANET aspects, and offers Validity Test and Consistency Test for the systems. Using our specification language, we have presented three different case studies based on a VANET system model we have created and put them into the system validity and consistency tests and showed how to describe a VANET system and its applications using our formal specification language

Automated analysis of security protocols with global state

Security APIs, key servers and protocols that need to keep the status of transactions, require to maintain a global, non-monotonic state, e.g., in the form of a database or register. However, most existing automated verification tools do not support the analysis of such stateful security protocols - sometimes because of fundamental reasons, such as the encoding of the protocol as Horn clauses, which are inherently monotonic. A notable exception is the recent tamarin prover which allows specifying protocols as multiset rewrite (msr) rules, a formalism expressive enough to encode state. As multiset rewriting is a "low-level" specification language with no direct support for concurrent message passing, encoding protocols correctly is a difficult and error-prone process. We propose a process calculus which is a variant of the applied pi calculus with constructs for manipulation of a global state by processes running in parallel. We show that this language can be translated to msr rules whilst preserving all security properties expressible in a dedicated first-order logic for security properties. The translation has been implemented in a prototype tool which uses the tamarin prover as a backend. We apply the tool to several case studies among which a simplified fragment of PKCS\#11, the Yubikey security token, and an optimistic contract signing protocol

Privacy compliance verification in cryptographic protocols

To provide privacy protection, cryptographic primitives are frequently applied to communication protocols in an open environment (e.g. the Internet). We call these protocols privacy enhancing protocols (PEPs) which constitute a class of cryptographic protocols. Proof of the security properties, in terms of the privacy compliance, of PEPs is desirable before they can be deployed. However, the traditional provable security approach, though well-established for proving the security of cryptographic primitives, is not applicable to PEPs. We apply the formal language of Coloured Petri Nets (CPNs) to construct an executable specification of a representative PEP, namely the Private Information Escrow Bound to Multiple Conditions Protocol (PIEMCP). Formal semantics of the CPN specification allow us to reason about various privacy properties of PIEMCP using state space analysis techniques. This investigation provides insights into the modelling and analysis of PEPs in general, and demonstrates the benefit of applying a CPN-based formal approach to the privacy compliance verification of PEPs

Automatic Verification of Security Protocols Using Approximations

Security protocols are widely used in open modern networks to ensure safe communications. It is now recognized that formal analysis can provide the level of assurance required by both developers and users of the protocols. Unfortunately it is generally undecidable to certify whether a protocol is safe or not. However the automatic verification of security protocols can be attempted using abstraction-based approximation. For this purpose, tree automata approximations were introduced by Genet and Klay in 2000. In this paper, we propose an extension of their techniques making the approach efficiently automatic. Our contribution has been implementing in the TA4SP tool with a high level specification language as input format, providing positive practical results on industrial security protocols

A temporal logic for the specification and verification of real-time systems

The development of a product typically starts with the specification of the user’s requirements and ends with the design of a system to meet those requirements. Traditional approaches to the specification and analysis of a system abstracted away from any notion of time at the specification level. However, for a real-time system the specification may include timing requirements. Many specification and verification methods for real-time systems are based on the assumption that time is discrete because the verification methods using it are significantly simpler than those using continuous time. Yet real-time systems operate in ‘real’ continuous time and their requirements are often specified using a continuous time model. In this thesis we develop a temporal logic and proof methods for the specifica­tion and verification of a real-time system which can be applied irrespective of whether time is discrete, continuous or dense. The logic is based on the defini­tion of the next operator as the next time point a change in state occurs or if no state change occurs then it is the time point obtained by incrementing the current time by one. We show that this definition of the next operator leads to a logic which is expressive enough for specifying real-time systems where continuous time is required, and in which the verification and proof methods developed for discrete time can be used. To demonstrate the applicability of the logic several varied examples including communication protocols and digital circuits are specified and their real-time properties proved. A compositional proof system which supports hierarchical development of programs is also developed for a real-time extension of a CSP-like language

Formal Specification Language for Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks

Vehicular Ad-Hoc Network (VANET) is a form of Mobile Ad-Hoc Network (wireless Network), originally used to provide safety & comfort for passengers, & currently being used to establish Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC) among near by Vehicles (V2V Communications) and between vehicles and nearby fixed infrastructure equipments; Roadside equipments (V2I Communications). VANET was used also to warn drivers of collision possibilities, road sign alarms, auto-payment at road tolls and parks. Usually VANET can be found in Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). VANET is the current and near future hot topic for research, that has been targeted by many researchers to develop some applications and protocols specifically for the VANET. But a problem facing all VANET researchers is the unavailability of a formal specification language to specify the VANET systems, protocols, applications and scenarios proposed by those researchers. A specification language is a formal language that is used during the systems design, analysis, and requirements analysis. Using a formal specification language, a researcher can show “What his system does”, Not How. As a contribution of our research we have created a formal specification language for VANET. We made the use of some Romans characters & some basic symbols to represent VANET Systems & Applications. In addition, we have created some combined symbols to represent actions and operations of the VANET system and its participating devices. Our formal specification language covers many of the VANET aspects, and offers Validity Test and Consistency Test for the systems. Using our specification language, we have presented three different case studies based on a VANET system model we have created and put them into the system validity and consistency tests and showed how to describe a VANET system and its applications using our formal specification language

Easing the Transition from Inspiration to Implementation: A Rapid Prototyping Platform for Wireless Medium Access Control Protocols

Packet broadcast networks are in widespread use in modern wireless communication systems. Medium access control is a key functionality within such technologies. A substantial research effort has been and continues to be invested into the study of existing protocols and the development of new and specialised ones. Academic researchers are restricted in their studies by an absence of suitable wireless MAC protocol development methods. This thesis describes an environment which allows rapid prototyping and evaluation of wireless medium access control protocols. The proposed design flow allows specification of the protocol using the specification and description language (SDL) formal description technique. A tool is presented to convert the SDL protocol description into a C++ model suitable for integration into both simulation and implementation environments. Simulations at various levels of abstraction are shown to be relevant at different stages of protocol design. Environments based on the Cinderella SDL simulator and the ns-2 network simulator have been developed which allow early functional verification, along with detailed and accurate performance analysis of protocols under development. A hardware platform is presented which allows implementation of protocols with flexibility in the hardware/software trade-off. Measurement facilities are integral to the hardware framework, and provide a means for accurate real-world feedback on protocol performance

Generation, Analysis and Verification of Cryptographic Protocol Implementations

Network security is an area of increasing importance in commercial, public and private environments. Much research has been done in the area of design and analysis of the cryptographic protocols that provide this security. However, there has been little focus on research into the correctness of the implementations of these protocols, as is evidenced by the number of security flaws found in implementations of cryptographic protocols in commercial software systems on a regular basis. In this research project we investigate the development of a code generation tool for generating protocol implementations that can be proven to meet their specifications. Requirements for generating such high integrity code involve using a cryptographic protocol specification language that has formal semantics, ideally a target implementation language that also has formal semantics and a translation process between the two that is proven to preserve the meaning of the specification in the mapping to the implementation. The ability to automatically generate protocol implementations from their specifications will also facilitate analysis such as comparing the performance of protocols with the same goals and testing the scalability of protocols for secure group communication, as well verification of other existing implementations of protocols