Attacking Group Protocols by Refuting Incorrect Inductive Conjectures

  • Authors:
  • Graham Steel;Alan Bundy

  • Affiliations:
  • School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK EH8 9LE;School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK EH8 9LE

  • Venue:
  • Journal of Automated Reasoning
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

Automated tools for finding attacks on flawed security protocols often fail to deal adequately with group protocols. The reason is that the abstractions made to improve performance on fixed two- or three-party protocols either preclude the modeling of group protocols altogether or permit modeling only in a fixed scenario, which can prevent attacks from being discovered. This paper describes Coral, a tool for finding counterexamples to incorrect inductive conjectures, which we have used to model protocols for both group key agreement and group key management, without any restrictions on the scenario. We show how we used Coral to discover six previously unknown attacks on three group protocols.