Proving security protocols with model checkers by data independence techniques

  • Authors:
  • A. W. Roscoe;P. J. Broadfoot

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-

  • Venue:
  • Journal of Computer Security
  • Year:
  • 1999

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Abstract

Model checkers such as FDR have been extremely effective inchecking for, and finding, attacks on cryptographic protocols -see, for example, and many of the papers in . Their use in provingprotocols has, on the other hand, generally been limited to showingthat a given small instance, usually restricted by the finitenessof some set of resources such as keys and nonces, is free ofattacks. While for specific protocols there are frequently goodreasons for supposing that this will find any attack, it leaves asubstantial gap in the method. The purpose of this paper is to showhow techniques borrowed from data independence and related fieldscan be used to achieve the illusion that nodes can call upon aninfinite supply of different nonces, keys, etc., even though theactual types used for these things remain finite. It is thuspossible to create models of protocols in which nodes do not haveto stop after a small number of runs, and to claim that afinite-state run on a model checker has proved that a givenprotocol is free from attacks which could be constructed in themodel used. We develop our methods via a series of case studies,discovering a number of methods for restricting the number ofstates generated in attempted proofs, and using two distinctapproaches to protocol specification.