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

Procedure-modular specification and verification of temporal safety properties

This paper describes ProMoVer, a tool for fully automated procedure-modular verification of Java programs equipped with method-local and global assertions that specify safety properties of sequences of method invocations. Modularity at the procedure-level is a natural instantiation of the modular verification paradigm, where correctness of global properties is relativized on the local properties of the methods rather than on their implementations. Here, it is based on the construction of maximal models for a program model that abstracts away from program data. This approach allows global properties to be verified in the presence of code evolution, multiple method implementations (as arising from software product lines), or even unknown method implementations (as in mobile code for open platforms). ProMoVer automates a typical verification scenario for a previously developed tool set for compositional verification of control flow safety properties, and provides appropriate pre- and post-processing. Both linear-time temporal logic and finite automata are supported as formalisms for expressing local and global safety properties, allowing the user to choose a suitable format for the property at hand. Modularity is exploited by a mechanism for proof reuse that detects and minimizes the verification tasks resulting from changes in the code and the specifications. The verification task is relatively light-weight due to support for abstraction from private methods and automatic extraction of candidate specifications from method implementations. We evaluate the tool on a number of applications from the domains of Java Card and web-based application

The simplicity project: easing the burden of using complex and heterogeneous ICT devices and services

As of today, to exploit the variety of different "services", users need to configure each of their devices by using different procedures and need to explicitly select among heterogeneous access technologies and protocols. In addition to that, users are authenticated and charged by different means. The lack of implicit human computer interaction, context-awareness and standardisation places an enormous burden of complexity on the shoulders of the final users. The IST-Simplicity project aims at leveraging such problems by: i) automatically creating and customizing a user communication space; ii) adapting services to user terminal characteristics and to users preferences; iii) orchestrating network capabilities. The aim of this paper is to present the technical framework of the IST-Simplicity project. This paper is a thorough analysis and qualitative evaluation of the different technologies, standards and works presented in the literature related to the Simplicity system to be developed

Secure Electronic Cards in Public Services

The paper presents the electronic wallet solution implemented within a GSM SIM technology for accessing public services. The solution is implemented in the medical field to provide information on the patient's medical history and payment for private medical services. The security issue is a very important one as the patient's history is confidential and the payment has to be safe.public services, mobile, security, m-application, smart card

AndroShield:automated Android applications vulnerability detection, a hybrid static and dynamic analysis approach

The security of mobile applications has become a major research field which is associated with a lot of challenges. The high rate of developing mobile applications has resulted in less secure applications. This is due to what is called the “rush to release” as defined by Ponemon Institute. Security testing—which is considered one of the main phases of the development life cycle—is either not performed or given minimal time; hence, there is a need for security testing automation. One of the techniques used is Automated Vulnerability Detection. Vulnerability detection is one of the security tests that aims at pinpointing potential security leaks. Fixing those leaks results in protecting smart-phones and tablet mobile device users against attacks. This paper focuses on building a hybrid approach of static and dynamic analysis for detecting the vulnerabilities of Android applications. This approach is capsuled in a usable platform (web application) to make it easy to use for both public users and professional developers. Static analysis, on one hand, performs code analysis. It does not require running the application to detect vulnerabilities. Dynamic analysis, on the other hand, detects the vulnerabilities that are dependent on the run-time behaviour of the application and cannot be detected using static analysis. The model is evaluated against different applications with different security vulnerabilities. Compared with other detection platforms, our model detects information leaks as well as insecure network requests alongside other commonly detected flaws that harm users’ privacy. The code is available through a GitHub repository for public contribution

Formally based semi-automatic implementation of an open security protocol

International audienceThis paper presents an experiment in which an implementation of the client side of the SSH Transport Layer Protocol (SSH-TLP) was semi-automatically derived according to a model-driven development paradigm that leverages formal methods in order to obtain high correctness assurance. The approach used in the experiment starts with the formalization of the protocol at an abstract level. This model is then formally proved to fulfill the desired secrecy and authentication properties by using the ProVerif prover. Finally, a sound Java implementation is semi-automatically derived from the verified model using an enhanced version of the Spi2Java framework. The resulting implementation correctly interoperates with third party servers, and its execution time is comparable with that of other manually developed Java SSH-TLP client implementations. This case study demonstrates that the adopted model-driven approach is viable even for a real security protocol, despite the complexity of the models needed in order to achieve an interoperable implementation

Declassification of Faceted Values in JavaScript

This research addresses the issues with protecting sensitive information at the language level using information flow control mechanisms (IFC). Most of the IFC mechanisms face the challenge of releasing sensitive information in a restricted or limited manner. This research uses faceted values, an IFC mechanism that has shown promising flexibility for downgrading the confidential information in a secure manner, also called declassification. In this project, we introduce the concept of first-class labels to simplify the declassification of faceted values. To validate the utility of our approach we show how the combination of faceted values and first-class labels can build various declassification mechanisms