Deductive verification of cryptographic software

We apply state-of-the art deductive verification tools to check security-relevant properties of cryptographic software, including safety, absence of error propagation, and correctness with respect to reference implementations. We also develop techniques to help us in our task, focusing on methods oriented towards increased levels of automation, in scenarios where there are clear obvious limits to such automation. These techniques allow us to integrate automatic proof tools with an interactive proof assistant, where the latter is used off-line to prove once-and-for-all fundamental lemmas about properties of programs. The techniques developed have independent interest for practical deductive verification in general.Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT

Deductive Verification of Cryptographic Software

We report on the application of an off-the-shelf verification platform to the RC4 stream cipher cryptographic software implementation (as available in the openSSL library), and introduce a deductive verification technique based on self-composition for proving the absence of error propagation

RPP: Automatic Proof of Relational Properties by Self-Composition

Self-composition provides a powerful theoretical approach to prove relational properties, i.e. properties relating several program executions, that has been applied to compare two runs of one or similar programs (in secure dataflow properties, code transformations, etc.). This tool demo paper presents RPP, an original implementation of self-composition for specification and verification of relational properties in C programs in the FRAMA-C platform. We consider a very general notion of relational properties invoking any finite number of function calls of possibly dissimilar functions with possible nested calls. The new tool allows the user to specify a relational property, to prove it in a completely automatic way using classic deductive verification, and to use it as a hypothesis in the proof of other properties that may rely on it

Formal verification of cryptographic software implementations

Tese de doutoramento em InformáticaSecurity is notoriously difficult to sell as a feature in software products. In addition to meeting a set of security requirements, cryptographic software has to be cheap, fast, and use little resources. The development of cryptographic software is an area with specific needs in terms of software development processes and tools. In this thesis we explore how formal techniques, namely deductive verification techniques, can be used to increase the guarantees that cryptographic software implementations indeed work as prescribed. This thesis is organized in two parts. The first part is focused on the identification of relevant security policies that may be at play in cryptographic systems, as well as the language-based mechanisms that can be used to enforce such policies in those systems. We propose methodologies based on deductive verification to formalise and verify relevant security policies in cryptographic software. We also show the applicability of those methodologies by presenting some case studies using a deductive verification tool integrated in the Frama-c framework. In the second part we propose a deductive verification tool (CAOVerif) for a domainspecific language for cryptographic implementations (CAO). Our aim is to apply the methodologies proposed in the first part of this thesis work to verify the cryptographic implementations written in CAO. The design of CAOVerif follows the same approach used in other scenarios for general-propose languages and it is build on top of a plug-in from the Frama-c framework. At the very end, we conclude the work of this thesis by reasoning about the soundness of our verification tool.O software criptográfico possui requisitos específicos para garantir a segurança da informação que manipula. Além disso, este tipo de software necessita de ser barato, rápido e utilizar um número reduzido de recursos. Garantir a segurança da informação que é manipulada por tais sistemas é um grande desafio, sendo por isso de grande objecto de estudo actualmente. Nesta tese exploramos como as técnicas formais, nomeadamente as técnicas de verificação dedutiva, podem ser utilizadas por forma a garantir que as implementações de software criptográfico funcionam, de facto, como prescrito. O trabalho desta tese está organizado em duas partes. A primeira parte foca-se essencialmente na identificação de políticas de segurança relevantes nos sistemas criptográficos, bem como nos mecanismos baseados em linguagens que podem ser aplicados para garantir tais políticas. Neste contexto, propomos metodologias baseadas em verificação dedutiva para formalizar e verificar políticas de segurança. Mostramos também como essas metodologias podem ser aplicadas na verificação de casos de estudo reais, utilizando a ferramenta de verificação dedutiva integrada na ferramenta Frama-c. Na segunda parte, propomos uma ferramenta de verificação dedutiva (CAOVerif) para uma linguagem de domínio específico para implementações criptográficas (CAO). O desenvolvimento de tal ferramenta tem como objectivo aplicar as metodologias desenvolvidas na primeira parte deste trabalho às implementações criptográficas definidas em CAO. O desenho desta ferramenta segue a mesma aproximação de outras ferramentas de verificação dedutiva já existentes para outras linguagens. Concluímos o trabalho desenvolvido dando um prova formal da correcção da ferramenta

A deductive verification platform for cryptographic software

In this paper we describe a deductive verification platform for the CAO language. CAO is a domain-specific language for cryptography. We show that this language presents interesting challenges for formal verification, not only in the rich mathematical type system that it introduces, but also in the cryptography-oriented language constructions that it offers. We describe how we tackle these problems, and also demonstrate that, by relying on the Jessie plug-in included in the Frama-C framework, the development time of such a complex verification tool could be greatly reduced. We base our presentation on real-world examples of CAO code, extracted from the open-source code of the NaCl cryptographic library, and illustrate how various cryptography-relevant security properties can be verified.(undefined

Data Minimisation in Communication Protocols: A Formal Analysis Framework and Application to Identity Management

With the growing amount of personal information exchanged over the Internet, privacy is becoming more and more a concern for users. One of the key principles in protecting privacy is data minimisation. This principle requires that only the minimum amount of information necessary to accomplish a certain goal is collected and processed. "Privacy-enhancing" communication protocols have been proposed to guarantee data minimisation in a wide range of applications. However, currently there is no satisfactory way to assess and compare the privacy they offer in a precise way: existing analyses are either too informal and high-level, or specific for one particular system. In this work, we propose a general formal framework to analyse and compare communication protocols with respect to privacy by data minimisation. Privacy requirements are formalised independent of a particular protocol in terms of the knowledge of (coalitions of) actors in a three-layer model of personal information. These requirements are then verified automatically for particular protocols by computing this knowledge from a description of their communication. We validate our framework in an identity management (IdM) case study. As IdM systems are used more and more to satisfy the increasing need for reliable on-line identification and authentication, privacy is becoming an increasingly critical issue. We use our framework to analyse and compare four identity management systems. Finally, we discuss the completeness and (re)usability of the proposed framework

A Deductive Verification Platform for Cryptographic Software

In this paper we describe a deductive verification platform for the CAO language. CAO is a domain-specific language for cryptography. We show that this language presents interesting challenges for formal verification, not only in the rich mathematical type system that it introduces, but also in the cryptography-oriented language constructions that it offers. We describe how we tackle these problems, and also demonstrate that, by relying on the Jessie plug-in included in the Frama-C framework, the development time of such a complex verification tool could be greatly reduced. We base our presentation on real-world examples of CAO code, extracted from the open-source code of the NaCl cryptographic library, and illustrate how various cryptography-relevant security properties can be verified

Formal verification of side-channel countermeasures using self-composition

Formal verification of cryptographic software implementations poses significant challenges for off-the-shelf tools. This is due to the domain-specific characteristics of the code, involving aggressive optimizations and non-functional security requirements, namely the critical aspect of countermeasures against side-channel attacks. In this paper, we extend previous results supporting the practicality of self-composition proofs of non-interference and generalizations thereof. We tackle the formal verification of high-level security policies adopted in the implementation of the recently proposed NaCl cryptographic library. We formalize these policies and propose a formal verification approach based on self-composition, extending the range of security policies that could previously be handled using this technique. We demonstrate our results by addressing compliance with the NaCl security policies in real-world cryptographic code, highlighting the potential for automation of our techniques.This work was partially supported by project SMART, funded by ENIAC joint Undertaking (GA 120224)