Security Programming with High-Level Abstractions: a Tutorial (Extended Abstract)

Abstract

The specification of security protocols with high-level programming abstractions, suited for security analysis and verification, has been advocated by the formal methods for security research community. Based on these principles of application design, we developed a tutorial to introduce undergraduate students to the foundations of security programming. The main pedagogical goal of this tutorial is to teach, in a simple and effective way, how to build secure distributed applications using common cryptographic primitives abstracting from their low-level details. The tutorial is aimed at helping the students to grasp quickly the main security concepts and to apply them effectively to the coding of distributed programs implementing security properties like authentication and secrecy. As programming is one of the main skills required by the cybersecurity industry, we believe that this tutorial can contribute to the professional development of future graduates