SeVe： automatic tool for verification of security protocols

• Published in: Frontiers of Computer Science Vol. 6; no. 1; pp. 57 - 75
• Main Authors: LUU, Anh Tuan, SUN, Jun, LIU, Yang, DONG, Jin Song, LI, Xiaohong, QUAN, Thanh Tho
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Heidelberg Higher Education Press 01.02.2012; SP Higher Education Press; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Algorithms; Authentication; AVISPA; Computer Science; Electronic voting systems; model checking; Modules; Privacy; process analysis toolkit (PAT); Research Article; secrecy; Secrecy aspects; Security; security protocols; Semantics; Toolkits; Verification; 安全协议; 攻击能力; 电子投票系统; 知识推理; 语义模型; 验证工具; 默认设置; security protocols; privacy; model checking; process analysis toolkit (PAT); secrecy; authentication
• ISSN: 1673-7350; 2095-2228; 1673-7466; 2095-2236
• DOI: 10.1007/s11704-012-2903-3

Security protocols play more and more important roles with wide use in many applications nowadays. Cur- rently, there are many tools for specifying and verifying secu- rity protocols such as Casper/FDR, ProVerif, or AVISPA. In these tools, the intruder＇s ability, which either needs to be specified explicitly or set by default, is not flexible in some circumstances. Moreover, whereas most of the existing tools focus on secrecy and authentication properties, few supports privacy properties like anonymity, receipt freeness, and coer- cion resistance, which are crucial in many applications such as in electronic voting systems or anonymous online transac- tions. In this paper, we introduce a framework for specifying security protocols in the labeled transition system （LTS） se- mantics model, which embeds the knowledge of the par- ticipants and parameterizes the ability of an attacker. Us- ing this model, we give the formal definitions for three types of privacy properties based on trace equivalence and knowledge reasoning. The formal definitions for some other security properties, such as secrecy and authentica- tion, are introduced under this framework, and the veri- fication algorithms are also given. The results of this pa- per are embodied in the implementation of a SeVe mod- ule in a process analysis toolkit （PAT） model checker, which supports specifying, simulating, and verifying se- curity protocols. The experimental results show that a SeVe module is capable of verifying many types of secu- rity protocols and complements the state-of-the-art securityverifiers in several aspects. Moreover, it also proves the abil- ity in building an automatic verifier for security protocols re- lated to privacy type, which are mostly verified by hand now.