Modelling and simulation of a biometric identity-based cryptography

Government information is a vital asset that must be kept in a trusted environment and efficiently managed by authorised parties. Even though e-Government provides a number of advantages, it also introduces a range of new security risks. Sharing confidential and top-secret information in a secure manner among government sectors tend to be the main element that government agencies look for. Thus, developing an effective methodology is essential and it is a key factor for e-Government success. The proposed e-Government scheme in this paper is a combination of identity-based encryption and biometric technology. This new scheme can effectively improve the security in authentication systems, which provides a reliable identity with a high degree of assurance. In addition, this paper demonstrates the feasibility of using Finite-state machines as a formal method to analyse the proposed protocols

Tools for efficient analysis of concurrent software systems

The ever increasing use of distributed computing as a method of providing added computing power and reliability has sparked interest in methods to model and analyze concurrent hardware/ software systems. Efficient automated analysis tools are needed to aid designers of such systems. The Distributed Systems Project at UCI has been developing a suite of tools (dubbed the P-NUT system) which supports efficient analysis of models of concurrent software. This paper presents the principles which guide the development of P-NUT tools and discusses the development of one of the tools: the Reachability Graph Builder (RGB). The P-NUT approach to tool development has resulted in the production of a highly efficient tool for constructing reachability graphs. The careful design of data structures and associated algorithms has significantly enlarged the class of models which can be analyzed

Model checking medium access control for sensor networks

We describe verification of S-MAC, a medium access control protocol designed for wireless sensor networks, by means of the PRISM model checker. The S-MAC protocol is built on top of the IEEE 802.11 standard for wireless ad hoc networks and, as such, it uses the same randomised backoff procedure as a means to avoid collision. In order to minimise energy consumption, in S-MAC, nodes are periodically put into a sleep state. Synchronisation of the sleeping schedules is necessary for the nodes to be able to communicate. Intuitively, energy saving obtained through a periodic sleep mechanism will be at the expense of performance. In previous work on S-MAC verification, a combination of analytical techniques and simulation has been used to confirm the correctness of this intuition for a simplified (abstract) version of the protocol in which the initial schedules coordination phase is assumed correct. We show how we have used the PRISM model checker to verify the behaviour of S-MAC and compare it to that of IEEE 802.11

Performance analysis using timed Petri Nets

Petri Nets have been successfully used to model and evaluate the performance of distributed systems. Several researchers have extended the basic Petri Net model to include time, and have demonstrated that restricted classes of Petri Nets can be analyzed efficiently. Unfortunately, the restrictions prohibit the techniques from being applied to many interesting systems, e.g. communication protocols. This paper proposes a version of timed Petri Nets which accurately models communication protocols, and which can be analyzed using Timed Reachability Graphs. Procedures for constructing and analyzing these graphs are presented. The analysis is shown to be applicable to a larger class of Timed Petri Nets than previously thought. The model and the analysis technique are demonstrated using a simple communication protocol

The derivation of performance expressions for communication protocols from timed Petri net models

Petri Net models have been extended in a variety of ways and have been used to prove the correctness and evaluate the performance of communication protocols. Several extensions have been proposed to model time. This work uses a form of Timed Petri Nets and presents a technique for symbolically deriving expressions which describe system performance. Unlike past work on performance evaluation of Petri Nets which assumes a priori knowledge of specific time delays, the technique presented here applies to a wide range of time delays so long as the delays satisfy a set of timing constraints. The technique is demonstrated using a simple communication protocol

Analysis of security protocols using finite-state machines

This paper demonstrates a comprehensive analysis method using formal methods such as finite-state machine. First, we describe the modified version of our new protocol and briefly explain the encrypt-then-authenticate mechanism, which is regarded as more a secure mechanism than the one used in our protocol. Then, we use a finite-state verification to study the behaviour of each machine created for each phase of the protocol and examine their behaviour s together. Modelling with finite-state machines shows that the modified protocol can function correctly and behave properly even with invalid input or time delay

A new biometric ID-based cryptography protocol and security analysis using Petri nets

This paper presents a Petri net (PN) approach to modelling, simulating, and analysing the new protocol we have proposed. This new protocol is an enhanced authentication scheme based on a biometric verification mechanism and identity based cryptography. A formal approach like Petri nets allows one to represent cryptographic protocols. For the sake of simplicity, a complex PN model will not be discussed in this paper until all attacks are demonstrated and the model proved to be secure. This paper shows how Petri nets are used to model, analyse and detect flaws in our new protocol. First, our proposed protocol is modelled without an adversary, and then a generic adversary model is added to examine all possible adversary behaviours. Finally we demonstrate how Petri nets can be used to analyse security threats such as man-in-the-middle attack, reflection attack, and parallel session attack on this protocol

Formal analysis techniques for gossiping protocols

We give a survey of formal verification techniques that can be used to corroborate existing experimental results for gossiping protocols in a rigorous manner. We present properties of interest for gossiping protocols and discuss how various formal evaluation techniques can be employed to predict them

Analyzing safety and fault tolerance using time Petri nets

The application of time Petri net modelling and analysis techniques to safety-critical real-time systems is explored and procedures described which allow analysis of safety, recoverability, and fault tolerance. These procedures can be used to help determine software requirements, to guide the use of fault detection and recovery procedures, to determine conditions which require immediate miti gating action to prevent accidents, etc. Thus it is possible to establish important properties duing the synthesis of the system and software design instead of using guesswork and costly a posteriori analysis