Detecting and Preventing Type flaws: a Control Flow Analysis with Tags

  • Authors:
  • Chiara Bodei;Pierpaolo Degano;Han Gao;Linda Brodo

  • Affiliations:
  • Dipartimento di Informatica, Università di Pisa, Via Pontecorvo, I-56127 Pisa - Italia;Dipartimento di Informatica, Università di Pisa, Via Pontecorvo, I-56127 Pisa - Italia;Informatics and Mathematical Modelling, Technical University of Denmark, Richard Petersens Plads bldg 321, DK-2800 Kongens Lyngby - Denmark;Dipartimento di Scienze dei Linguaggi, Università di Sassari, via Tempio,9, I-07100 Sassari - Italia

  • Venue:
  • Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science (ENTCS)
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

A type flaw attack on a security protocol is an attack where an honest principal is cheated on interpreting a field in a message as the one with a type other than the intended one. In this paper, we shall present an extension of the LySa calculus with tags attached to each field, indicating the intended types. We developed a control flow analysis for analysing the extended LySa, which over-approximates all the possible behaviour of a protocol and hence is able to capture any type confusion that may happen during the protocol execution. The control flow analysis has been applied to a number of security protocols, either subject to type flaw attacks or not. The results show that it is able to capture type flaw attacks on those security protocols.