Trusted execution: applications and verification

Useful security properties arise from sealing data to specific units of code. Modern processors featuring Intel’s TXT and AMD’s SVM achieve this by a process of measured and trusted execution. Only code which has the correct measurement can access the data, and this code runs in an environment trusted from observation and interference. We discuss the history of attempts to provide security for hardware platforms, and review the literature in the field. We propose some applications which would benefit from use of trusted execution, and discuss functionality enabled by trusted execution. We present in more detail a novel variation on Diffie-Hellman key exchange which removes some reliance on random number generation. We present a modelling language with primitives for trusted execution, along with its semantics. We characterise an attacker who has access to all the capabilities of the hardware. In order to achieve automatic analysis of systems using trusted execution without attempting to search a potentially infinite state space, we define transformations that reduce the number of times the attacker needs to use trusted execution to a pre-determined bound. Given reasonable assumptions we prove the soundness of the transformation: no secrecy attacks are lost by applying it. We then describe using the StatVerif extensions to ProVerif to model the bounded invocations of trusted execution. We show the analysis of realistic systems, for which we provide case studies

Policy issues in interconnecting networks

To support the activities of the Federal Research Coordinating Committee (FRICC) in creating an interconnected set of networks to serve the research community, two workshops were held to address the technical support of policy issues that arise when interconnecting such networks. The workshops addressed the required and feasible technologies and architectures that could be used to satisfy the desired policies for interconnection. The results of the workshop are documented

Council of Europe Recommendation CM/Rec(2017)5 and e-Voting Protocol Design

The Corona pandemic has created a push towards digitization in a number of fields, not least in the public sector including democratic processes. This of course includes an increased interest in e-voting via the Internet. The Council of Europe has a long-standing history of work in the field including two Recommendations – (2004)11 and (2017)5 – which have become the de facto yardstick against which every e-voting system is measured. Rec(2017)5 builds on a decade of experience with e-voting and particularly strengthens two concepts important in any electronic voting system: Voting secrecy and auditability/verifiability. This has distinct implications for the design of e-voting protocols. The aim of this paper is to analyse the impact on what arguably are the most popular voting protocol families, envelope and token protocols. How does the modified Recommendation impact on the viability of protocols and protocol design? The paper first presents the Council of Europe Recommendation and the technical issues it addresses. Then a model is introduced to assess a voting protocol against the Recommendation; a typical envelope and a token protocol are assessed in view of the model and finally the two assessments are compared including policy recommendations for a path to e-voting implementation

Union, intersection, and refinement types and reasoning about type disjointness for security protocol analysis

In this thesis we present two new type systems for verifying the security of cryptographic protocol models expressed in a spi-calculus and, respectively, of protocol implementations expressed in a concurrent lambda calculus. In this thesis we present two new type systems for verifying the security of cryptographic protocol models expressed in a spi-calculus and, respectively, of protocol implementations expressed in a concurrent lambda calculus. The two type systems combine prior work on refinement types with union and intersection types and with the novel ability to reason statically about the disjointness of types. The increased expressivity enables the analysis of important protocol classes that were previously out of scope for the type-based analyses of cryptographic protocols. In particular, our type systems can statically analyze protocols that are based on zero-knowledge proofs, even in scenarios when certain protocol participants are compromised. The analysis is scalable and provides security proofs for an unbounded number of protocol executions. The two type systems come with mechanized proofs of correctness and efficient implementations.In dieser Arbeit werden zwei neue Typsysteme vorgestellt, mit denen die Sicherheit kryptographischer Protokolle, modelliert in einem spi-Kalkül, und Protokollimplementierungen, beschrieben in einem nebenläufigen Lambdakalkül, verifiziert werden kann. Die beiden Typsysteme verbinden vorausgehende Arbeiten zu Verfeinerungstypen mit disjunktiven und konjunktiven Typen, und ermöglichen außerdem, statisch zu folgern, dass zwei Typen disjunkt sind. Die Ausdrucksstärke der Systeme erlaubt die Analyse wichtiger Klassen von Protokollen, die bisher nicht durch typbasierte Protokollanalysen behandelt werden konnten. Insbesondere ist mit den vorgestellten Typsystemen auch die statische Analyse von Protokollen möglich, die auf Zero-Knowledge-Beweisen basieren, selbst unter der Annahme, dass einige Protokollteilnehmer korrumpiert sind. Die Analysetechnik skaliert und erlaubt Sicherheitsbeweise für eine unbeschränkte Anzahl von Protokollausführungen. Die beiden Typsysteme sind formal korrekt bewiesen und effizient implementiert