Edinburgh, Scotland
Sunday, April 03, 2005


Description

Context

Experience over the last twenty years has shown that, even assuming perfect cryptography, the design of security protocols (or cryptographic protocols, as they are sometimes called) is highly error-prone and that conventional validation techniques based on informal arguments and/or testing are not up to the task. It is now widely recognized that only formal analysis can provide the level of assurance required by both the developers and the users of the protocols. This is especially true not only when one considers the simple academic protocols that have been proposed as example applications for automated reasoning techniques and tools (such as the Needham-Schroeder Public Key Protocol and the like), but also when one tries to scale up these techniques and tools to industrial-strength Internet security protocols (like Kerberos and IKE).

Work in this direction initially started in the security community but recently there has been a tremendous progress thanks to contributions from different automated reasoning communities, such as model checking, resolution, planning, rewriting/narrowing, and higher-order theorem proving. Moreover, there has been another wave of progress due to research in applying non-classical logics, such as epistemic and belief logics, to analyze protocols and their properties.

Based on this progress, a large number of formal methods and tools have been developed that have been quite successful in determining strengths and weaknesses of many protocols, i.e. in proving the correctness of the protocols or in identifying attacks on them.

Outline

The tutorial aims to provide an introduction to the development and application of automated techniques and tools for the formal specification and analysis of Internet security protocols. To that end, the tutorial will consist of two main modules.

The first module will be devoted to the introduction to Internet security protocols. This module will introduce the terminology and the basic concepts of security and cryptography and of security protocols. We will discuss simple security protocols, which provide the basis for the running examples considered throughout the tutorial. We will also present some recent and current standardization discussions and efforts at the IETF and 3GPP to secure the new requirements for the Internet, such as IKE (Internet Key Exchange), Kerberos, Mobile-IP Security, UMTS AKA (Authenticated Key Agreement), and Multicast Streaming (for instance, continuous authentication of radio and TV Internet broadcasts).

The second module will survey the most significant techniques and tools for automated security protocol analysis. In particular, we will discuss the main techniques underlying model-checking and theorem proving approaches to the formal specification and analysis of security protocols. We will also briefly discuss complexity and (un)decidability results.

Intended Audience

The tutorial aims to provide an introduction to the development and application of automated techniques and tools for the formal specification and analysis of Internet security protocols. Hence, no prerequisite knowledge on computer security will be assumed.
There is no limitation to participation: the tutorial will be open to all interested persons.

Presenters

Slides


Last modified: Thu Apr 7 14:15:45 CEST 2005