Visible to the public Automating Compositional Analysis of Authentication Protocols

TitleAutomating Compositional Analysis of Authentication Protocols
Publication TypeConference Paper
Year of Publication2020
AuthorsZhang, Zichao, de Amorim, Arthur Azevedo, Jia, Limin, Pasareanu, Corina S.
Conference Name2020 Formal Methods in Computer Aided Design (FMCAD)
Keywordsauthentication, composability, compositionality, cryptographic protocols, design automation, Protocols, pubcrawl, Servers
AbstractModern verifiers for cryptographic protocols can analyze sophisticated designs automatically, but require the entire code of the protocol to operate. Compositional techniques, by contrast, allow us to verify each system component separately, against its own guarantees and assumptions about other components and the environment. Compositionality helps protocol design because it explains how the design can evolve and when it can run safely along other protocols and programs. For example, it might say that it is safe to add some functionality to a server without having to patch the client. Unfortunately, while compositional frameworks for protocol verification do exist, they require non-trivial human effort to identify specifications for the components of the system, thus hindering their adoption. To address these shortcomings, we investigate techniques for automated, compositional analysis of authentication protocols, using automata-learning techniques to synthesize assumptions for protocol components. We report preliminary results on the Needham-Schroeder-Lowe protocol, where our synthesized assumption was capable of lowering verification time while also allowing us to verify protocol variants compositionally.
DOI10.34727/2020/isbn.978-3-85448-042-6_18
Citation Keyzhang_automating_2020