A Generic Methodology for the Modular Verification of Security Protocol Implementations (extended version)


Loading...

Date

2023-09-10

Publication Type

Working Paper

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.

Publication status

published

Editor

Book title

Journal / series

Volume

Pages / Article No.

Publisher

Cornell University

Event

Edition / version

v2

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 check_circle

Notes

Funding

Related publications and datasets

Is supplement to: