Security Protocol Language Research Articles

Model‐based mutation testing from security protocols in HLPSL

SummaryIn recent years, important efforts have been made for offering a dedicated language for modelling and verifying security protocols. Outcome of the European project AVISPA, the high‐level security protocol language (HLPSL) aims at providing a means for verifying usual security properties (such as data secrecy) in message exchanges between agents. However, verifying the security protocol model does not guarantee that the actual implementation of the protocol will fulfil these properties. This article presents a model‐based testing approach, relying on the mutation of HLPSL models to generate abstract test cases. The proposed mutations aim at introducing leaks in the security protocols and represent real‐world implementation errors. The mutated models are then analysed by the automated validation of Internet security protocols and applications tool set, which produces, when the mutant protocol is declared unsafe, counterexample traces exploiting the security flaws and, thus, providing test cases. A dedicated framework is then used to concretize the abstract attack traces, bridging the gap between the formal model level and the implementation level. This model‐based testing technique has been experimented on a wide range of security protocols, in order to evaluate the mutation operators. This process has also been fully tool‐supported, from the mutation of the HLPSL model to the concretization of the abstract test cases into test scripts. It has been applied to a realistic case study of the Paypal payment protocol, which made it possible to discover a vulnerability in an implementation of an e‐commerce framework. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

An Engineering Realization Method for Security Protocols

We put forward an engineering realization method for security protocols. First, a formal description language for security protocols is designed. Then, a security protocol interpreter is designed, through which the corresponding objective code is generated with the description document as input. Analysis indicates that compared with the existing schemes our scheme has obvious advantages.

Provably correct Java implementations of Spi Calculus security protocols specifications

Spi Calculus is an untyped high level modeling language for security protocols, used for formal protocols specification and verification. In this paper, a type system for the Spi Calculus and a translation function are formally defined, in order to formalize the refinement of a Spi Calculus specification into a Java implementation. The Java implementation generated by the translation function uses a custom Java library. Formal conditions on such library are stated, so that, if the library implementation code satisfies such conditions, then the generated Java implementation correctly simulates the Spi Calculus specification. A verified implementation of part of the custom library is further presented.

Secure sessions for Web services

We address the problem of securing sequences of SOAP messages exchanged between web services and their clients. The WS-Security standard defines basic mechanisms to secure SOAP traffic, one message at a time. For typical web services, however, using WS-Security independently for each message is rather inefficient; moreover, it is often important to secure the integrity of a whole session, as well as each message. To these ends, recent specifications provide further SOAP-level mechanisms. WS-SecureConversation defines security contexts , which can be used to secure sessions between two parties. WS-Trust specifies how security contexts are issued and obtained. We develop a semantics for the main mechanisms of WS-Trust and WS-SecureConversation, expressed as a library for TulaFale, a formal scripting language for security protocols. We model typical protocols relying on these mechanisms and automatically prove their main security properties. We also informally discuss some pitfalls and limitations of these specifications.

Wireless Authentication in chi-Spaces

The chi-Spaces framework provides a set of tools to support every step of the security protocol's life-cycle. The framework includes a simple, yet powerful programming language which is an implementation of the Security Protocol Language (SPL). SPL is a formal calculus designed to model security protocols and prove interesting properties about them. In this paper we take an authentication protocol suited for low-power wireless devices and derive a chi-Spaces implementation from its SPL model. We study the correctness of the resulting implementation using the underlying SPL semantics of chi-Spaces.

Language, Semantics, and Methods for Cryptographic Protocols

In this report we present a process language for security protocols together<br />with an operational semantics and an alternative semantics in terms of sets<br /> of events. The denotation of process is a set of events, and as each event specifies<br /> a set of pre- and postconditions, this denotation can be viewed as a Petri net.<br />This Petri-net semantics has a strong relation to both Paulson's inductive set<br />of rules [Pau98] and strand spaces [THG98c]. By means of an example we<br />illustrate how the Petri-net semantics can be used to prove properties such as<br />secrecy and authentication.