On the secure implementation of security protocols

  • Authors:
  • Pablo Giambiagi;Mads Dam

  • Affiliations:
  • Swedish Institute of Computer Science, Kista, Sweden;Swedish Institute of Computer Science, Kista, Sweden

  • Venue:
  • ESOP'03 Proceedings of the 12th European conference on Programming
  • Year:
  • 2003

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Abstract

We consider the problem of implementing a security protocol in such a manner that secrecy of sensitive data is not jeopardized. Implementation is assumed to take place in the context of an API that provides standard cryptography and communication services. Given a dependency specification, stating how API methods can produce and consume secret information, we propose an information flow property based on the idea of invariance under perturbation, relating observable changes in output to corresponding changes in input. Besides the information flowcondition itself, the main contributions of the paper are results relating the admissibility property to a direct flow property in the special case of programs which branch on secrets only in cases permitted by the dependency rules. These results are used to derive an unwinding-like theorem, reducing a behavioral correctness check (strong bisimulation) to an invariant.