Verification Of Protocols Research Articles

Understanding Wireless Debugging with Sniffers in Smart Home Environments

Wireless communication is becoming increasingly prevalent in smart home environments; the need for effective debugging methodologies has become paramount for system reliability and performance optimization. This comprehensive article analysis explores the implementation of wireless sniffers across multiple protocols, including Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and Zigbee, with particular emphasis on their application in contemporary IoT devices. Through a detailed examination of chipset capabilities from major manufacturers, including Qualcomm Atheros, Texas Instruments, and Nordic Semiconductor, this article presents a structured approach to wireless debugging that encompasses packet capture mechanisms, signal analysis, and protocol verification. The investigation demonstrates how modern sniffer technologies can effectively diagnose common issues such as packet loss, signal interference, and protocol misconfigurations in smart home devices, including voice assistants, security systems, and environmental controls. By synthesizing practical implementation strategies with technical analysis, this article provides developers and system architects with actionable methodologies for improving wireless system reliability while highlighting the critical role of protocol analysis in ensuring robust IoT deployments.

A Practical Approach to Formal Methods: An Eclipse Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for Security Protocols

In order to develop trustworthy distributed systems, verification techniques and formal methods, including lightweight and practical approaches, have been employed to certify the design or implementation of security protocols. Lightweight formal methods offer a more accessible alternative to traditional fully formalised techniques by focusing on simplified models and tool support, making them more applicable in practical settings. The technical advantages of formal verification over manual testing are increasingly recognised in the cybersecurity community. However, applying formal methods, even in their more practical forms, outside highly specialised research settings remains challenging. For practitioners, formal modelling and verification are often too complex and unfamiliar to be used routinely. In this paper, we present an Eclipse Integrated Development Environment for the design, verification, and implementation of security protocols and evaluate its effectiveness, including feedback from users in educational settings. It offers user-friendly assistance in the formalisation process as part of a Model-Driven Development approach. This IDE centres around the Alice & Bob (AnB) notation, the AnBx Compiler and Code Generator, the OFMC model checker, and the ProVerif cryptographic protocol verifier. For the evaluation, we identify the six most prominent limiting factors for formal method adoption, based on relevant literature in this field, and we consider the IDE’s effectiveness against those criteria. Additionally, we conducted a structured survey to collect feedback from university students who have used the toolkit for their projects. The findings demonstrate that this contribution is valuable as a workflow aid and helps users grasp essential cybersecurity concepts, even for those with limited knowledge of formal methods or cryptography. Crucially, users reported that the IDE has been an important component to complete their projects and that they would use again in the future, given the opportunity.

Timed Interpreted Systems as a New Agent-Based Formalism for Verification of Timed Security Protocols

This article introduces a new method for modelling and verifying the execution of timed security protocols (TSPs) and their time-dependent security properties. The method, which is novel and reliable, uses an extension of interpreted systems, accessible semantics in multi-agent systems, and timed interpreted systems (TISs) with dense time semantics to model TSP executions. We enhance the models of TSPs by incorporating delays and varying lifetimes to capture real-life aspects of protocol executions. To illustrate the method, we model a timed version of the Needham–Schroeder Public Key Authentication Protocol. We have also developed a new bounded model checking reachability algorithm for the proposed structures, based on Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMTs), and implemented it within the tool. The method comprises a new procedure for modelling TSP executions, translating TSPs into TISs, and translating TISs’ reachability problem into the SMT problem. The paper also includes thorough experimental results for nine protocols modelled by TISs and discusses the findings in detail.

Formal verification of timely knowledge propagation in airborne networks

Ensuring timely coordination between autonomous aircraft is a challenging problem in decentralized air traffic management (ATM) applications for urban air mobility (UAM) scenarios. This paper presents an approach for formally guaranteeing timely progress in a Two-Phase Acknowledge distributed knowledge propagation protocol by probabilistically modeling the delays using the theory of the Multicopy Two-Hop Relay protocol and the M/M/1 queue system. The guarantee states a probabilistic upper bound to the time for progress as a function of the probabilities of the total transmission and processing delays following two specific distributions. The proof uses a general library of formal theories, that can be used for the rigorous mechanical verification of autonomous aircraft coordination protocols using the Athena proof checker and assistant.

Formal Methods for Security Protocol Verification: Model Checking and Theorem Proving Approaches

Formal methods are a key part of making sure that cryptographic systems are safe and reliable. For the purpose of checking security protocols, this paper looks into two well-known formal methods: model checking and theorem proving. When you do model checking, you go through all of a system's possible states to see if it meets certain criteria. On the other hand, theorem proving uses formal evidence and mathematical reasoning to show that protocols are correct. In the beginning of the paper, an outline of security protocols and the need for formal proof methods to make sure they are strong against possible threats is given. Then it goes into the ideas and methods behind model checking and shows how it can be used in security protocol analysis. Model checking lets you do automatic checks, which lets you look into all the possible states of a system and find any security holes. The study then looks at theorem proving as an alternative way to check protocols. Theorem proving uses mathematical thinking to make formal proofs that show protocols are right. Although theorem proving usually needs help from a person with the right knowledge, it gives more security by making sure everything is right using strong mathematical foundations. It is talked about what the pros and cons of each method are, taking things like scale, automation, and expression into account. It also talks about important improvements and new tools in each method, showing how people are still working to make security protocol testing techniques more efficient and effective. The last part of the paper compares model checking and theorem proving, focusing on how they work together and how important it is to use both to make sure the security of cryptographic protocols. Also, it shows how important it is to choose the right formal methods based on the needs and features of the protocol in question.

Design and Verification of Low Latency AMBA AXI4 and ACE Protocol for On-Chip Peripheral Communication

Design and Verification of Low Latency AMBA AXI4 and ACE Protocol for On-Chip Peripheral Communication

Toward designing a lightweight RFID authentication protocol for constrained environments

AbstractIn present times, Radio‐Frequency Identification (RFID) systems have seen a significant rise in their usage. There has been an increasing interest in developing even lighter RFID protocols suitable for resource‐constrained environments. Ensuring security and privacy remain critical challenges in RFID‐based systems. Recently proposed lightweight authentication schemes, namely LRSAS+ and LRARP+, are ideally suited for constrained devices. However, this article investigates these schemes and reveals certain vulnerabilities: LRSAS+ is susceptible to tag impersonation, desynchronization, and traceability attacks, while LRARP+ can fall prey to traceability and secret disclosure attacks. An enhanced version of these authentication systems is proposed that tackles their inherent weaknesses by leveraging the function. To verify the security of the proposed scheme, a formal analysis is conducted using Gong–Needham–Yahalom logic (GNY logic) and an automated security protocol verification tool, ProVerif. The improved scheme's effectiveness is also compared with multiple contemporary lightweight systems. The results indicate that the enhanced scheme not only meets the security requirements for lightweight authentication schemes but also achieves this with minimal computational overhead.

Enhancing Computer Security through Formal Verification of Cryptographic Protocols Using Model Checking and Partial Order Techniques

This study explores the integration of partial, order reduction techniques with model checking to enhance the verification of cryptographic protocols. Cryptographic, protocols are essential for securing digital communications, and data; however, ensuring their robustness and reliability through traditional verification methods can be challenging due to, their complexity and the vast number of potential executions, paths. This research utilizes the SPIN, model checker and PROMELA language to model and verify three types of, cryptographic protocols: a basic authentication handshake, an encrypted data transfer, protocol, and a complex, multi-factor authentication process. Each protocol was, verified with and, without the application of partial order reduction techniques. The findings demonstrate that partial order, reduction, not only significantly reduces the computational resources, required—by approximately 40%—but also maintains the thoroughness needed to identify critical, security flaws such as replay, attacks, data integrity breaches, and authentication failures. This study, underscores the, efficacy of combining partial order reduction with model, checking, proposing that this, approach significantly improves the scalability and efficiency, of cryptographic protocol, verification. The results advocate, for the continued development and application of these, techniques to ensure the secure and reliable deployment of cryptographic protocols in various digital environments

A local search approach to protocol verification

Verification of parameterized protocols is of great interest in the area of formal verification, mainly due to the practical importance of such systems. Explicit-state model checking is an essential approach in which states for a system are maintained in explicit form, as are all state transitions. In order to reduce the search space to a minimum, we propose a local search strategy. In detail, first, heuristic functions are designed to guide the searching of bugs more effectively, which exploits information extracted from invariants and rulesets, to improve the calculation of a distance between two states. Second, candidate solutions with poor scores are dropped for further compression of the state space explored. Especially, we apply successfully our local search algorithm to the reachable analysis of a real-world implementation of TileLink protocol.

Blockchain-Enabled Secure and Interoperable Authentication Scheme for Metaverse Environments

The metaverse, which amalgamates physical and virtual realms for diverse social activities, has been the focus of extensive application development by organizations, research institutes, and companies. However, these applications are often isolated, employing distinct authentication methods across platforms. Achieving interoperable authentication is crucial for when avatars traverse different metaverses to mitigate security concerns like impersonation, mutual authentication, replay, and server spoofing. To address these issues, we propose a blockchain-enabled secure and interoperable authentication scheme. This mechanism uniquely identifies users in the physical world as well as avatars, facilitating seamless navigation across verses. Our proposal is substantiated through informal security analyses, employing automated verification of internet security protocols and applications (AVISPA), the real-or-random (ROR) model, and Burrows–Abadi–Needham (BAN) logic and showcasing effectiveness against a broad spectrum of security threats. Comparative assessments against similar schemes demonstrate our solution’s superiority in terms of communication costs, computation costs, and security features. Consequently, our blockchain-enabled, interoperable, and secure authentication scheme stands as a robust solution for ensuring security in metaverse environments.

Formal validation of authentication scheme in 5G-enabled vehicular networks using AVISPA

Smart transportation may come from 5G-enabled cars. Traffic reports include congestion, roads, and driving. Urbanisation and population growth increase traffic accidents and travel time. Traffic accidents kill and injure most people worldwide. Intelligent transportation systems (ITS) improves driver and pedestrian safety. This study connects the VANET to 5G to create a 5G-enabled vehicle network because the road-side unit (RSU) is expensive and unsecure. This study connects numerous automobiles to TA for 5G-BS D2D communication. Data transmissions between autos are risky. Several scholars suggest authentication techniques for safe vehicle-to-vehicle communications. Overhead may enable side-channel attacks with these tactics. A secure and effective efficient and secure authentication-privacy-preserving (ES-APP) system connected TA, 5G-BS, and on-border unit (OBU) was presented. Initialization, vehicle registration, parameter renewal, message signing, single and batch verification are ES-APP steps. The formal evaluation automated verification of internet security protocols and applications (AVISPA) tool with on-the-fly model-checker (OFMC) and attack searcher (ATSE) back-ends secures the suggested ES-APP technique. ES-APP appears impervious to active and passive AVISPA assaults.

Advancing Security Protocol Verification: A Comparative Study of Scyther, Tamarin

In the dynamic field of Internet security, verifying and analyzing security protocols is crucial for ensuring secure and effective communication. This paper presents an analysis of leading tools used for the verification, falsification, and analysis of security protocols, focusing particularly on Scyther and Tamarin. We examine the methodologies, capabilities, and applications of these tools in various contexts, including cloud computing and IoT, highlighting their unique approaches and contributions to the field. The paper starts with an examination of the Scyther tool, emphasizing its innovative approach to automated falsification and verification, and its application in multi-protocol analysis. We then transition to exploring the use of Scyther in verifying key agreement protocols in cloud computing. A comparative analysis of Scyther and Tamarin is also presented, shedding light on their effectiveness in identifying security properties and revealing the strengths and weaknesses of different protocols. This is further enriched by a detailed look at the unbounded verification capabilities of Scyther. Additionally, the paper covers the capabilities of the Tamarin prover, exploring its advanced features in symbolic analysis, its ability to handle complex security properties, and its application in verifying protocol implementations. Through this paper, we aim to provide a comprehensive overview of the current landscape in security protocol verification, offering insights into the methodologies, challenges, and future directions in this essential area of research.

Parikh’s Theorem Made Symbolic

Parikh’s Theorem is a fundamental result in automata theory with numerous applications in computer science. These include software verification (e.g. infinite-state verification, string constraints, and theory of arrays), verification of cryptographic protocols (e.g. using Horn clauses modulo equational theories) and database querying (e.g. evaluating path-queries in graph databases), among others. Parikh’s Theorem states that the letter-counting abstraction of a language recognized by finite automata or context-free grammars is definable in Linear Integer Arithmetic (a.k.a. Presburger Arithmetic). In fact, there is a linear-time algorithm computing existential Presburger formulas capturing such abstractions, which enables an efficient analysis via SMT-solvers. Unfortunately, real-world applications typically require large alphabets (e.g. Unicode, containing a ‍million of characters) — which are well-known to be not amenable to explicit treatment of the alphabets — or even worse infinite alphabets. Symbolic automata have proven in the last decade to be an effective algorithmic framework for handling large finite or even infinite alphabets. A symbolic automaton employs an effective boolean algebra, which offers a symbolic representation of character sets (i.e. in terms of predicates) and often lends itself to an exponentially more succinct representation of a language. Instead of letter-counting, Parikh’s Theorem for symbolic automata amounts to counting the number of times different predicates are satisfied by an input sequence. Unfortunately, naively applying Parikh’s Theorem from classical automata theory to symbolic automata yields existential Presburger formulas of exponential size. In this paper, we provide a new construction for Parikh’s Theorem for symbolic automata and grammars, which avoids this exponential blowup: our algorithm computes an existential formula in polynomial-time over (quantifier-free) Presburger and the base theory. In fact, our algorithm extends to the model of parametric symbolic grammars, which are one of the most expressive models of languages over infinite alphabets. We have implemented our algorithm and show it can be used to solve string constraints that are difficult to solve by existing solvers.

Toward Auto-Modeling of Formal Verification for NextG Protocols: A Multimodal Cross- and Self-Attention Large Language Model Approach

Toward Auto-Modeling of Formal Verification for NextG Protocols: A Multimodal Cross- and Self-Attention Large Language Model Approach

A Lightweight and Secure Communication Protocol for the IoT Environment

Ensuring secure communications for the Internet of Things (IoT) systems remains a challenge. Due to exacting resource limitations of computing, memory, and communication in IoT environments, communication schemes based on asymmetric cryptographic systems can be challenging to deploy. An alternative is to deploy symmetric encryption schemes based on pre-shared keys. However, there are also challenges in designing such schemes and examples include how to achieve an optimal trade-off between security and performance levels while meeting resource consumption requirements. Hence, this paper presents a lightweight key synchronization update algorithm, which is then used as a building block in our proposed lightweight secure communication protocol. The security of the protocol is analyzed to show that it can resist common attacks, such as replay attacks, and man-in-the-middle attacks. We then use Tamarin, a widely accepted security protocol verification tool, for formal verification. In addition, we evaluate the randomness and computational performance of the lightweight key synchronization update algorithm and demonstrate that it outperforms other schemes. We also evaluate the performance of the protocol, in terms of computational and communication costs, to demonstrate utility.

Security Analysis and Enhancement of INTERBUS Protocol in ICS Based on Colored Petri Net

The integration of buses in industrial control systems, fueled by advancements such as the Internet of Things (IoT), has led to their widespread adoption, significantly enhancing operational efficiency. However, with the increasing interconnection of systems, ensuring the security of bus communications and protocols has become an urgent priority. This paper focuses on addressing the specific security concerns associated with the widely adopted INTERBUS protocol—a fieldbus protocol. Our approach leverages the theory of colored Petri nets (CPN) for modeling, enabling a comprehensive analysis of the protocol’s security. Rigorous formal verification and analysis of the security protocol are conducted by employing the Dolev–Yao adversary model. Our investigation reveals the presence of three critical vulnerabilities: replay attacks, tampering, and impersonation. To fortify the security of the protocol, we propose the introduction of a key distribution center and the utilization of hash values. Through meticulous analysis and verification, our proposed enhancements effectively reinforce the security performance of the INTERBUS protocol.

Verification of cryptocurrency consensus protocols: reenterable colored Petri net model design

The reliability of consensus protocols establishes the basis for cryptocurrency cybersecurity. Formal and simulation techniques are appreciated for the verification of proof-of-work agreement protocols, because the formal techniques development process frequently requires a series of assumptions, leading to somewhat unrealistic models. A conventional colored Petri net model, presented by the authors in a previous study, allowed us to refine the Keller and Böhme consensus protocol by applying the simulation technique. In this study, we developed a reenterable colored Petri net model representing a general construct for model-driven development and refinement of consensus protocols and the corresponding software. A considerable benefit of a reenterable model is the invariance of its structure with respect to the net topology, number of attached nodes, and parameters of their software and hardware, which are represented as the marking of dedicated places. Switching of topology tags associated with dynamic objects represents the basic principle of reenterable model functioning. It is shown that, having the same characteristics, in bounds of admissible error of some 2-3%, the reenterable model results in 6 times speed-up of the simulation process and a drastic decrease in time for model editing, especially when the number of nodes exceeds a hundred. Thus, a reenterable model is a valuable complement to possible formal models that allows us to obtain express-evaluations of characteristics in a rather short time and with an acceptable level of adequacy.

Verification of a multi-connectivity protocol for Tactile Internet applications

Tactile Internet refers to a network that enables real-time, high-reliability haptic communication and control between humans, machines, and objects over the Internet. Tactile Internet applications include the remote control of drones, cars or industrial tele-operation. In this context, the Multi-connection Tactile Internet Protocol (MTIP) is a novel multipath transport protocol designed to support the requirements of Tactile Internet applications in large, private mobile networks. The objective of this paper is to analyze and verify the correctness and performance of the MTIP protocol to ensure that the protocol functions correctly under different network scenarios and it is ready to meet the performance requirements of Tactile Internet applications. For that purpose, a two-step approach is employed to analyze and verify MTIP. In the first step, a formal model of MTIP is developed using timed automata and the uppaal tool is utilized to verify correctness properties represented as temporal formulas. In the second step, the performance of the protocol is analyzed using the statistical model checking features of uppaal (uppaalsmc) in scenarios that are difficult and expensive to reproduce in a real network. The results indicate that MTIP’s model meets the specified temporal properties, and the performance evaluation showcases the potential and trade-off of using multiple paths to enhance the communication. Based on the analysis and verification results, the paper emphasizes the readiness of MTIP for real-world deployment and highlights its potential benefits for enhancing the performance of Tactile Internet applications.

Symbolic protocol verification with dice1

Symbolic protocol verification generally abstracts probabilities away, considering computations that succeed only with negligible probability, such as guessing random numbers or breaking an encryption scheme, as impossible. This abstraction, sometimes referred to as the perfect cryptography assumption, has shown very useful as it simplifies automation of the analysis. However, probabilities may also appear in the control flow where they are generally not negligible. In this paper we consider a framework for symbolic protocol analysis with a probabilistic choice operator: the probabilistic applied π-calculus. We define and explore the relationships between several behavioral equivalences. In particular we show the need for randomized schedulers and exhibit a counter-example to a result in a previous work that relied on non-randomized ones. As in other frameworks that mix both non-deterministic and probabilistic choices, schedulers may sometimes be unrealistically powerful. We therefore consider two subclasses of processes that avoid this problem. In particular, when considering purely non-deterministic protocols, as is done in classical symbolic verification, we show that a probabilistic adversary has – maybe surprisingly – a strictly superior distinguishing power for may testing, which, when the number of sessions is bounded, we show to coincide with purely possibilistic similarity.

FIDO Gets Verified: A Formal Analysis of the Universal Authentication Framework Protocol

The FIDO protocol suite aims at allowing users to log in to remote services with a local and trusted authenticator. With FIDO, relying services do not need to store user-chosen secrets or their hashes, which eliminates a major attack surface for e-business. Given its increasing popularity, it is imperative to formally analyze whether the security promises of FIDO hold. In this paper, we present a comprehensive and formal verification of the FIDO UAF protocol by formalizing its security assumptions and goals and modeling the protocol under different scenarios in ProVerif. Our analysis identifies the minimal security assumptions required for each of the security goals of FIDO UAF to hold. We confirm previously manually discovered vulnerabilities in an automated way and disclose several new attacks. Guided by the formal verification results, we also discovered two practical attacks on two popular Android FIDO apps, which we responsibly disclosed to the vendors. In addition, we offer several concrete recommendations to fix the identified problems and weaknesses in the protocol.