A compiler for analyzing cryptographic protocols using noninterference

  • Authors:
  • Antonio Durante;Riccardo Focardi;Roberto Gorrieri

  • Affiliations:
  • Univ. di Roma “La Sapienza”;Univ. Ca' Foscari di Venezia, Venezia Mestre, Italy;Univ. di Bologna, Bologna, Italy

  • Venue:
  • ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM)
  • Year:
  • 2000

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Abstract

The Security Process Algebra (SPA) is a CCS-like specification languag e where actions belong to two different levels of confidentiality. It has been used to define several noninterference-like security properties whose verification has been automated by the tool CoSeC. In recent years, a method for analyzing security protocols using SPA and CoSeC has been developed. Even if it has been useful in analyzing small security protocols, this method has shown to be error-prone, as it requires the protocol description and its environment to be written by hand. This problem has been solved by defining a protocol specification language more abstract than SPA, called VSP, and a compiler CVS that automatically generates the SPA specification for a given protocol described in VSP. The VSP/CVS technology is very powerful, and its usefulness is shown with some case studies: the Woo-Lam one-way authentication protocol, for which a new attack to authentication is found, and the Wide Mouthed Frog protocol, where different kinds of attack are detected and analyzed.