Securing Statically-verified Communications Protocols Against Timing Attacks

• Authors: Mikael Buchholtz;Stephen Gilmore;Jane Hillston;Flemming Nielson
• Venue: Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science (ENTCS)
• Year: 2005

We present a federated analysis of communication protocols which considers both security properties and timing. These are not entirely independent observations of a protocol; by using timing observations of an executing protocol it is possible to calculate encryption keys which were intended to be secret or to deduce derived information about the nature of the communication even in the presence of unbreakable encryption. Our analysis is based on expressing the protocol as a high-level model and deriving from this process calculus models analysable by the Imperial PEPA Compiler and the LySatool. ot represent single instances of systems, but actually whole (possibly infinite) classes of instances. The goal is to show the correctness independently of the parameter and thus for the whole class. For example, one wants to show the correctness of a communication protocol for an arbitrary number n of participants or the correctness of an elevator control software for an arbitrary number n of floors. Parameterized verification is of special importance w.r.t. scalability of systems, i.e., one wants to show the correctness of a system with a certain basic structure independently of its size. While proof techniques have been used for such problems for some time, more recently also algorithmic and semi-algorithmic approaches are being developed. These often use automata theoretic models and acceleration techniques. The main topics of VEPAS 2001 were the following:*Abstract models for systems with an arbitrary number of components. *Scalability of systems and verification methods. *Abstraction methods and proof techniques in verification. *Automata theoretic models, fixpoints and acceleration methods. *Combinations of algorithms and proof techniques. VEPAS 2001 was one of the four satellite workshops of the 28th International Colloquium on Automata, Languages and Programming (ICALP 2001), held in Crete, Greece, July 8-12, 2001. The five papers in this volume were selected by the Program Committee from nine submissions received in response to a Call for Papers. The proceedings appear as Volume 50 No. 4 in the series Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science (ENTCS). The volumes in the ENTCS series can be accessed at the URL http://www.elsevier.nl/locate/entcs. The program committee of VEPAS 2001 consisted of the following people:*Ahmed Bouajjani (Universite Paris 7, France) *Bengt Jonsson (Uppsala University, Sweden) *Antonin Kucera (Masaryk University, Czech Republic) *Richard Mayr (chair) (Albert-Ludwigs University Freiburg, Germany) *A. Prasad Sistla (University of Illinois at Chicago, USA) We would like to thank Christos Zaroliagis (ICALP 2001 Satellite Workshops Coordinator) for his continuous support. Many thanks are due to Parosh Abdulla and Ahmed Bouajjani (Invited Speakers) and to the members of the Program Committee as well as their sub-referees for their accurate work. July 2001 Richard Mayr