1,521 research outputs found
Validating a Web Service Security Abstraction by Typing
An XML web service is, to a first approximation, an RPC service in which
requests and responses are encoded in XML as SOAP envelopes, and transported
over HTTP. We consider the problem of authenticating requests and responses at
the SOAP-level, rather than relying on transport-level security. We propose a
security abstraction, inspired by earlier work on secure RPC, in which the
methods exported by a web service are annotated with one of three security
levels: none, authenticated, or both authenticated and encrypted. We model our
abstraction as an object calculus with primitives for defining and calling web
services. We describe the semantics of our object calculus by translating to a
lower-level language with primitives for message passing and cryptography. To
validate our semantics, we embed correspondence assertions that specify the
correct authentication of requests and responses. By appeal to the type theory
for cryptographic protocols of Gordon and Jeffrey's Cryptyc, we verify the
correspondence assertions simply by typing. Finally, we describe an
implementation of our semantics via custom SOAP headers.Comment: 44 pages. A preliminary version appears in the Proceedings of the
Workshop on XML Security 2002, pp. 18-29, November 200
Formal Verification of Security Protocol Implementations: A Survey
Automated formal verification of security protocols has been mostly focused on analyzing high-level abstract models which, however, are significantly different from real protocol implementations written in programming languages. Recently, some researchers have started investigating techniques that bring automated formal proofs closer to real implementations. This paper surveys these attempts, focusing on approaches that target the application code that implements protocol logic, rather than the libraries that implement cryptography. According to these approaches, libraries are assumed to correctly implement some models. The aim is to derive formal proofs that, under this assumption, give assurance about the application code that implements the protocol logic. The two main approaches of model extraction and code generation are presented, along with the main techniques adopted for each approac
Safe abstractions of data encodings in formal security protocol models
When using formal methods, security protocols are usually modeled at a high level of abstraction. In particular, data encoding and decoding transformations are often abstracted away. However, if no assumptions at all are made on the behavior of such transformations, they could trivially lead to security faults, for example leaking secrets or breaking freshness by collapsing nonces into constants. In order to address this issue, this paper formally states sufficient conditions, checkable on sequential code, such that if an abstract protocol model is secure under a Dolev-Yao adversary, then a refined model, which takes into account a wide class of possible implementations of the encoding/decoding operations, is implied to be secure too under the same adversary model. The paper also indicates possible exploitations of this result in the context of methods based on formal model extraction from implementation code and of methods based on automated code generation from formally verified model
Categoric aspects of authentication
[no abstract available
Securing Interactive Sessions Using Mobile Device through Visual Channel and Visual Inspection
Communication channel established from a display to a device's camera is
known as visual channel, and it is helpful in securing key exchange protocol.
In this paper, we study how visual channel can be exploited by a network
terminal and mobile device to jointly verify information in an interactive
session, and how such information can be jointly presented in a user-friendly
manner, taking into account that the mobile device can only capture and display
a small region, and the user may only want to authenticate selective
regions-of-interests. Motivated by applications in Kiosk computing and
multi-factor authentication, we consider three security models: (1) the mobile
device is trusted, (2) at most one of the terminal or the mobile device is
dishonest, and (3) both the terminal and device are dishonest but they do not
collude or communicate. We give two protocols and investigate them under the
abovementioned models. We point out a form of replay attack that renders some
other straightforward implementations cumbersome to use. To enhance
user-friendliness, we propose a solution using visual cues embedded into the 2D
barcodes and incorporate the framework of "augmented reality" for easy
verifications through visual inspection. We give a proof-of-concept
implementation to show that our scheme is feasible in practice.Comment: 16 pages, 10 figure
Automatic Verification of Correspondences for Security Protocols
We present a new technique for verifying correspondences in security
protocols. In particular, correspondences can be used to formalize
authentication. Our technique is fully automatic, it can handle an unbounded
number of sessions of the protocol, and it is efficient in practice. It
significantly extends a previous technique for the verification of secrecy. The
protocol is represented in an extension of the pi calculus with fairly
arbitrary cryptographic primitives. This protocol representation includes the
specification of the correspondence to be verified, but no other annotation.
This representation is then translated into an abstract representation by Horn
clauses, which is used to prove the desired correspondence. Our technique has
been proved correct and implemented. We have tested it on various protocols
from the literature. The experimental results show that these protocols can be
verified by our technique in less than 1 s.Comment: 95 page
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