Security Analysis of Parlay/OSA Framework

This paper analyzes the security of the Trust and Security Management (TSM) protocol, an authentication protocol which is part of the Parlay/OSA Application Program Interfaces (APIs). Architectures based on Parlay/OSA APIs allow third party service providers to develop new services that can access, in a controlled and secure way, to those network capabilities offered by the network operator. Role of the TSM protocol, run by network gateways, is to authenticate the client applications trying to access and use the network capabilities features offered. For this reason potential security flaws in its authentication strategy can bring to unauthorized use of network with evident damages to the operator and to the quality of the services. This paper shows how a rigorous formal analysis of TSM underlines serious weaknesses in the model describing its authentication procedure. This usually means that also the original system (i.e., the TSM protocol itself) hides the same flaws. The paper relates about the design activity of the formal model, the tool-aided verification performed and the security flaws discovered. This will allow us to discuss about how the security of the TSM protocol can be generally improve

A Formal Theory of Key Conjuring

Key conjuring is the process by which an attacker obtains an unknown, encrypted key by repeatedly calling a cryptographic API function with random values in place of keys. We propose a formalism for detecting computationally feasible key conjuring operations, incorporated into a Dolev-Yao style model of the security API. We show that security in the presence of key conjuring operations is decidable for a particular class of APIs, which includes the key management API of IBM’s Common Cryptographic Architecture (CCA)

Deduction with XOR Constraints in Security API Modelling

We introduce XOR constraints, and show how they enable a theorem prover to reason effectively about security critical subsystems which employ bitwise XOR. Our primary case study is the API of the IBM 4758 hardware security module. We also show how our technique can be applied to standard security protocols

High-level Cryptographic Abstractions

The interfaces exposed by commonly used cryptographic libraries are clumsy, complicated, and assume an understanding of cryptographic algorithms. The challenge is to design high-level abstractions that require minimum knowledge and effort to use while also allowing maximum control when needed. This paper proposes such high-level abstractions consisting of simple cryptographic primitives and full declarative configuration. These abstractions can be implemented on top of any cryptographic library in any language. We have implemented these abstractions in Python, and used them to write a wide variety of well-known security protocols, including Signal, Kerberos, and TLS. We show that programs using our abstractions are much smaller and easier to write than using low-level libraries, where size of security protocols implemented is reduced by about a third on average. We show our implementation incurs a small overhead, less than 5 microseconds for shared key operations and less than 341 microseconds (< 1%) for public key operations. We also show our abstractions are safe against main types of cryptographic misuse reported in the literature

A Formal Security Analysis of an OSA/Parlay Authentication Interface

Abstract. We report on an experience in analyzing the security of the Trust and Security Management (TSM) protocol, an authentication procedure within the OSA/Parlay Application Program Interfaces (APIs) of the Open Service Access and Parlay Group. The experience has been conducted jointly by research institutes experienced in security and industry experts in telecommunication networking. OSA/Parlay APIs are designed to enable the creation of telecommunication applications outside the traditional network space and business model. Network operators consider the OSA/Parlay a promising architecture to stimulate the development of web service applications by third party providers, which may not necessarily be experts in telecommunication and security. The TSM protocol is executed by the gateways to OSA/Parlay networks; its role is to authenticate client applications trying to access the interfaces of some object representing an offered network capability. For this reason, potential security flaws in the TSM authentication strategy can cause the unauthorized use of the network, with evident damages to the operator and the quality of services. We report a rigorous formal analysis of the TSM specification, which is originally given in UML. Furthermore, we illustrate our design choices to obtain the formal model, describe the tool-aided verification and finally expose the security flaws discovered