Efficient Java Code Generation of Security Protocols Specified in AnB/AnBx

The implementation of security protocols is challenging and error-prone, as experience has proved that even widely used and heavily tested protocols like TLS and SSH need to be patched every year due to low-level implementation bugs. A model-driven development approach allows automatic generation of an application, from a simpler and abstract model that can be formally verified. In this work we present the AnBx compiler, a tool for automatic generation of Java code of security protocols specified in the popular Alice & Bob notation, suitable for agile prototyping. In contrast with the existing tools, the AnBx compiler uses a simpler specification language and computes the consistency checks that agents has to perform on reception of messages. This is an important feature for robust implementations. Moreover, the tool applies various optimization strategies to achieve efficiency both at compile time and at run time. A support library interfaces the Java Cryptographic Architecture allowing for easy customization of the application

An IDE for the Design, Verification and Implementation of Security Protocols

Security protocols are critical components for the construction of secure and dependable distributed applications, but their implementation is challenging and error prone. Therefore, tools for formal modelling and analysis of security protocols can be potentially very useful to support software engineers. However, despite such tools have been available for a long time, their adoption outside the research community has been very limited. In fact, most practitioners find such applications too complex and hardly usable for their daily work. In this paper, we present an Integrated Development Environment for the design, verification and implementation of security protocols, aimed at lowering the adoption barrier of formal methods tools for security. In the spirit of Model Driven Development, the environment supports the user in the specification of the model using the simple and intuitive language AnB (and its extension AnBx). Moreover, it provides a push-button solution for the formal verification of the abstract and concrete models, and for the automatic generation of Java implementation. This Eclipse-based IDE leverages on existing languages and tools for modelling and verification of security protocols, such as the AnBx Compiler and Code Generator, the model checker OFMC and the protocol verifier ProVerif

Automatic Generation of Security Protocols Attacks Specifications and Implementations

Confidence in a communication protocol’s security is a key requirement for its deployment and long-term maintenance. Checking if a vulnerability exists and is exploitable requires extensive expertise. The research community has advocated for a systematic approach with formal methods to model and automatically test a protocol against a set of desired security properties. As verification tools reach conclusions, the applicability of their results still requires expert scrutiny. We propose a code generation approach to automatically build both an abstract specification and a concrete implementation of a Dolev-Yao intruder from an abstract attack trace, bridging the gap between theoretical attacks discovered by formal means and practical ones. Through our case studies, we focus on attack traces from the OFMC model checker, Alice&Bob specifications and Java implementations. We introduce a proof-of-concept workflow for concrete attack validation that allows to conveniently integrate, in a user-friendly way, formal methods results into a Model-Driven Development process and at the same time automatically generate a program that allows to demonstrate the attack in practice. In fact, in this contribution, we produce high-level and concrete attack narrations that are both human and machine readable

AnBx - Security Protocols Design and Verification

Designing distributed protocols is challenging, as it requires actions at very different levels: from the choice of network-level mechanisms to protect the exchange of sensitive data, to the definition of structured interaction patterns to convey application-specific guarantees. Current security infrastructures provide very limited support for the specification of such guarantees. As a consequence, the high-level security properties of a protocol typically must often be hard-coded explicitly, in terms of low-level cryptographic notions and devices which clutter the design and undermine its scalability and robustness. To counter these problems, we propose an extended Alice & Bob notation for protocol narrations (AnBx) to be employed for a purely declarative modelling of distributed protocols. These abstractions provide a compact specification of the high-level security guarantees they convey, and help shield the design from the details of the underlying cryptographic infrastructure. We discuss an implementation of the abstractions based on a translation from the AnBx notation to the AnB language supported by the OFMC [1,2] verification tool. We show the practical effectiveness of our approach by revisiting the iKP e-payment protocols, and showing that the security goals achieved by our declarative specification outperform those offered by the original protocols

Security Protocol Specification and Verification with AnBx

Designing distributed protocols is complex and requires actions at very different levels: from the design of an interaction flow supporting the desired application-specific guarantees, to the selection of the most appropriate network-level protection mechanisms. To tame this complexity, we propose AnBx, a formal protocol specification language based on the popular Alice & Bob notation. AnBx offers channels as the main abstraction for communication, providing different authenticity and/or confidentiality guarantees for message transmission. AnBx extends existing proposals in the literature with a novel notion of forwarding channels, enforcing specific security guarantees from the message originator to the final recipient along a number of intermediate forwarding agents. We give a formal semantics of AnBx in terms of a state transition system expressed in the AVISPA Intermediate Format. We devise an ideal channel model and a possible cryptographic implementation, and we show that, under mild restrictions, the two representations coincide, thus making AnBx amenable to automated verification with different tools. We demonstrate the benefits of the declarative specification style distinctive of AnBx by revisiting the design of two existing e-payment protocols, iKP and SET

User-friendly Formal Methods for Security-aware Applications and Protocols

Formal support in the design and implementation of security-aware applications increases the assurance in the final artifact. Formal methods techniques work by setting a model that unambiguously defines attacker capabilities, protocol parties behavior, and expected security properties. Rigorous reasoning can be done on the model about the interaction of the external attacker with the protocol parties, assessing whether the security properties hold or not. Unfortunately, formal verification requires a high level of expertise to be used properly and, in complex systems, the model analysis requires an amount of resources (memory and time) that are not available with current technologies. The aim of this thesis is to propose new interfaces and methodologies that facilitate the usage of formal verification techniques applied to security-aware protocols and distributed applications. In particular, this thesis presents: (i) Spi2JavaGUI, a framework for the model-driven development of security protocols, that combines (for the first time in literature) an intuitive user interface, automated formal verification and code generation; (ii) a new methodology that enables the model-driven development and the automated formal analysis of distributed applications, which requires less resources and formal verification knowledge to complete the verification process, when compared to previous approaches; (iii) the formal verification of handover procedures defined by the Long Term Evolution (LTE) standard for mobile communication networks, including the results and all the translation rules from specification documents to formal models, that facilitates the application of formal verification to other parts of the standard in the future