ACM CCS ’23 Artifact Appendix: A Generic Methodology for the Modular Verification of Security Protocol Implementations


Loading...

Date

2023

Publication Type

Other Conference Item

ETH Bibliography

yes

Citations

Altmetric

Data

Abstract

Security protocols are essential building blocks of modern IT systems. Subtle flaws in their design or implementation may compromise the security of entire systems. It is, thus, important to prove the absence of such flaws through formal verification. Much existing work focuses on the verification of protocol models, which is not sufficient to show that their implementations are actually secure. Verification techniques for protocol implementations (e.g., via code generation or model extraction) typically impose severe restrictions on the used programming language and code design, which may lead to sub-optimal implementations. In this paper, we present a methodology for the modular verification of strong security properties directly on the level of the protocol implementations. Our methodology leverages state-of-the-art verification logics and tools to support a wide range of implementations and programming languages. We demonstrate its effectiveness by verifying memory safety and security of Go implementations of the Needham-Schroeder-Lowe, Diffie-Hellman key exchange, and WireGuard protocols, including forward secrecy and injective agreement for WireGuard. We also show that our methodology is agnostic to a particular language or program verifier with a prototype implementation for C. Hence, our work comprises a reusable verification library implementing our methodology in Go and prototypically in C, a pen-and-paper sketch of our soundness proof, and four verified implementations of security protocols: Needham-Schroeder-Lowe implemented in C and Go implementations of Needham-Schroeder-Lowe, the Diffie-Hellman key exchange, and WireGuard protocols.

Publication status

published

External links

Editor

Book title

Journal / series

Volume

Pages / Article No.

Publisher

Event

30th ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS 2023)

Edition / version

Methods

Software

Geographic location

Date collected

Date created

Subject

protocol implementation verification; symbolic security; separation logic; automated verification; injective agreement; forward secrecy

Organisational unit

03653 - Müller, Peter / Müller, Peter

Notes

Funding

Related publications and datasets