A Security Formal Verification Method for Protocols Using Cryptographic Contactless Smart Cards

We present a method of contactless smart card protocol modeling suitable for finding vulnerabilities using model checking. Smart cards are used in applications that require high level of security, such as payment applications, therefore it should be ensured that the implementation does not contain any vulnerabilities. High level application specifications may lead to different implementations. Protocol that is proved to be secure on high level and that uses secure smart card can be implemented in more than one way, some of these implementations are secure, some of them introduce vulnerabilities to the application. The goal of this paper is to provide a method that can be used to create a model of arbitrary smart card, with focus on contactless smart cards, to create a model of the protocol, and to use model checking to find attacks in this model. AVANTSSAR Platform was used for the formal verification, the models are written in the ASLan++ language. Examples demonstrate the usability of the proposed method

towards formal validation of trust and security in the internet of services

Service designers and developers, while striving to meet the requirements posed by application scenarios, have a hard time to assess the trust and security impact of an option, a minor change, a combination of functionalities, etc., due to the subtle and unforeseeable situations and behaviors that can arise from this panoply of choices. This often results in the release of flawed products to end-users. This issue can be significantly mitigated by empowering designers and developers with tools that offer easy to use graphical interfaces and notations, while employing established verification techniques to efficiently tackle industrial-size problems. The formal verification of trust and security of the Internet of Services will significantly boost its development and public acceptance

Compiling symbolic attacks to protocol implementation tests

Recently efficient model-checking tools have been developed to find flaws in security protocols specifications. These flaws can be interpreted as potential attacks scenarios but the feasability of these scenarios need to be confirmed at the implementation level. However, bridging the gap between an abstract attack scenario derived from a specification and a penetration test on real implementations of a protocol is still an open issue. This work investigates an architecture for automatically generating abstract attacks and converting them to concrete tests on protocol implementations. In particular we aim to improve previously proposed blackbox testing methods in order to discover automatically new attacks and vulnerabilities. As a proof of concept we have experimented our proposed architecture to detect a renegotiation vulnerability on some implementations of SSL/TLS, a protocol widely used for securing electronic transactions.Comment: In Proceedings SCSS 2012, arXiv:1307.802

Orchestration under Security Constraints

International audienceAutomatic composition of web services is a challenging task. Many works have considered simplified automata models that abstract away from the structure of messages exchanged by the services. For the domain of secured services (using e.g. digital signing or timestamping) we propose a novel approach to automated composition of services based on their security policies. Given a community of services and a goal service, we reduce the problem of composing the goal from services in the community to a security problem where an intruder should intercept and redirect messages from the service community and a client service till reaching a satisfying state. We have implemented the algorithm in AVANTSSAR Platform and applied the tool to several case studies

Intruder deducibility constraints with negation. Decidability and application to secured service compositions

The problem of finding a mediator to compose secured services has been reduced in our former work to the problem of solving deducibility constraints similar to those employed for cryptographic protocol analysis. We extend in this paper the mediator synthesis procedure by a construction for expressing that some data is not accessible to the mediator. Then we give a decision procedure for verifying that a mediator satisfying this non-disclosure policy can be effectively synthesized. This procedure has been implemented in CL-AtSe, our protocol analysis tool. The procedure extends constraint solving for cryptographic protocol analysis in a significative way as it is able to handle negative deducibility constraints without restriction. In particular it applies to all subterm convergent theories and therefore covers several interesting theories in formal security analysis including encryption, hashing, signature and pairing.Comment: (2012

Automated Verification of Virtualized Infrastructures

Virtualized infrastructures and clouds present new challenges for security analysis and formal verification: they are complex environments that continuously change their shape, and that give rise to non-trivial security goals such as isolation and failure resilience requirements. We present a platform that connects declarative and expressive description languages with state-of-the art verification methods. The languages integrate homogeneously descriptions of virtualized infras-tructures, their transformations, their desired goals, and evaluation strategies. The different verification tools range from model checking to theorem proving; this allows us to exploit the complementary strengths of methods, and also to understand how to best represent the analysis problems in different contexts. We consider first the static case where the topology of the virtual infrastructure is fixed and demonstrate that our platform allows for the declarative specification of a large class of properties. Even though tools that are special-ized to checking particular properties perform better than our generic approach, we show with a real-world case study that our approach is practically feasible. We finally consider also the dynamic case where the intruder can actively change the topology (by migrating machines). The combination of a complex topology and changes to it by an intruder is a problem that lies beyond the scope of previous analysis tools and to which we can give first positive verification results

Formal Analysis of Vulnerabilities of Web Applications Based on SQL Injection (Extended Version)

We present a formal approach that exploits attacks related to SQL Injection (SQLi) searching for security flaws in a web application. We give a formal representation of web applications and databases, and show that our formalization effectively exploits SQLi attacks. We implemented our approach in a prototype tool called SQLfast and we show its efficiency on real-world case studies, including the discovery of an attack on Joomla! that no other tool can find

Security challenges and solutions for e-business

The advantages of economic growth and increasing ease of operation afforded by e-business and e-commerce developments are unfortunately matched by growth in cyber attacks. This paper outlines the common attacks faced by e-business and describes the defenses that can be used against them. It also reviews the development of newer security defense methods. These are: (1) biometrics for authentication; parallel processing to increase power and speed of defenses; (2) data mining and machine learning to identify attacks; (3) peer-to-peer security using blockchains; 4) enterprise security modelling and security as a service; and (5) user education and engagement. The review finds overall that one of the most prevalent dangers is social engineering in the form of phishing attacks. Recommended counteractions include education and training, and the development of new machine learning and data sharing approaches so that attacks can be quickly discovered and mitigated

Design, Formal Specification and Analysis of Multi-Factor Authentication Solutions with a Single Sign-On Experience

Over the last few years, there has been an almost exponential increase of the number of mobile applications that deal with sensitive data, such as applications for e-commerce or health. When dealing with sensitive data, classical authentication solutions based on username-password pairs are not enough, and multi-factor authentication solutions that combine two or more authentication elements of different categories are required. Many different such solutions are available, but they usually cover the scenario of a user accessing web applications on their laptops, whereas in this paper we focus on native mobile applications. This changes the exploitable attack surface and thus requires a specific analysis. In this paper, we present the design, the formal specification and the security analysis of a solution that allows users to access different mobile applications through a multi-factor authentication solution providing a Single Sign-On experience. The formal and automated analysis that we performed validates the security goals of the solution we propose