Critical and widely used cryptographic protocols have repeatedly been found to contain flaws in their design and their implementation. A prominent class of such vulnerabilities is logical attacks, e.g. attacks that exploit flawed protocol logic. Automated formal verification methods, based on the Dolev-Yao (DY) attacker, formally define and excel at finding such flaws, but operate only on abstract specification models. Fully automated verification of existing protocol implementations is today still out of reach. This leaves open whether such implementations are secure. Unfortunately, this blind spot hides numerous attacks, such as recent logical attacks on widely used TLS implementations introduced by implementation bugs.We answer by proposing a novel and effective technique that we call DY model-guided fuzzing, which precludes logical attacks against protocol implementations. The main idea is to consider as possible test cases the set of abstract DY executions of the DY attacker, and use a novel mutation-based fuzzer to explore this set. The DY fuzzer concretizes each abstract execution to test it on the program under test. This approach enables reasoning at a more structural and security-related level of messages represented as formal terms (e.g. decrypt a message and re-encrypt it with a different key) as opposed to random bit-level modifications that are much less likely to produce relevant logical adversarial behaviors. We implement a full-fledged and modular DY protocol fuzzer. We demonstrate its effectiveness by fuzzing three popular TLS implementations, resulting in the discovery of four novel vulnerabilities.

The results of electronic elections should be verifiable so that any cheating is detected. To support this, many protocols employ an electronic bulletin board (BB) for publishing data that can be read by participants and used for verifiability checks. We demonstrate that the BB is itself a security-critical component that has often been treated too casually in previous designs and analyses. In particular, we present novel attacks on the e-voting protocols Belenios, Civitas, and Helios that violate some of their central security claims under realistic system assumptions. These attacks were outside the scope of prior security analyses as their verifiability notions assume an idealized BB.To enable the analysis of protocols under realistic assumptions about the BB, we introduce a new verifiability definition applicable to arbitrary BBs. We identify a requirement, called final-agreement, and formally prove that it is sufficient and, in most cases, necessary to achieve verifiability. We then propose a BB protocol that satisfies final-agreement under weak, realistic trust assumptions and provide a machine-checked proof thereof. Our protocol can replace existing BBs, enabling verifiability under much weaker trust assumptions.

In cryptographic protocols, in particular RFID protocols, exclusive-or (XOR) operations are common. Due to the inherent complexity of faithful models of XOR, there is only limited tool support for the verification of cryptographic protocols using XOR. In this paper, we improve the Tamarin prover and its underlying theory to deal with an equational theory modeling XOR operations. The XOR theory can be combined with all equational theories previously supported, including user-defined equational theories. This makes Tamarin the first verification tool for cryptographic protocols in the symbolic model to support simultaneously this large set of equational theories, protocols with global mutable state, an unbounded number of sessions, and complex security properties including observational equivalence. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by analyzing several protocols that rely on XOR, in particular multiple RFID-protocols, where we can identify attacks as well as provide proofs.

We advance the state-of-the-art in automated symbolic analysis of ballot secrecy for e-voting protocols by proposing a method based on analysing three conditions that together imply ballot secrecy. Our approach has two main advantages over existing automated approaches. The first is a substantial expansion of the class of protocols and threat models that can be automatically analysed: our approach can systematically deal with (a) honest authorities present in different phases, (b) threat models in which no dishonest voters occur, and (c) protocols whose ballot secrecy depends on fresh data coming from other phases. The second advantage is that our approach can significantly improve verification efficiency, as the individual conditions are often simpler to verify. E.g., for the LEE protocol, we obtain a speedup of over two orders of magnitude. We show the scope and effectiveness of our approach using ProVerif in several case studies, including the FOO, LEE, JCJ, and Belenios protocols.

In this paper, we consider the problem of verifying anonymity and unlinkability in the symbolic model, where protocols are represented as processes in a variant of the applied pi calculus, notably used in the [Formula: see text] tool. Existing tools and techniques do not allow to verify directly these properties, expressed as behavioral equivalences. We propose a different approach: we design two conditions on protocols which are sufficient to ensure anonymity and unlinkability, and which can then be effectively checked automatically using [Formula: see text]. Our two conditions correspond to two broad classes of attacks on unlinkability, i.e. data and control-flow leaks. This theoretical result is general enough that it applies to a wide class of protocols based on a variety of cryptographic primitives. In particular, using our tool, [Formula: see text], we provide the first formal security proofs of protocols such as BAC and PACE (e-passport), Hash-Lock (RFID authentication), etc. Our work has also lead to the discovery of new attacks, including one on the LAK protocol (RFID authentication) which was previously claimed to be unlinkable (in a weak sense).

Abstract Mobile communications are used by more than two-thirds of the world population who expect security and privacy guarantees. The 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) responsible for the worldwide standardization of mobile communication has designed and mandated the use of the AKA protocol to protect the subscribers’ mobile services. Even though privacy was a requirement, numerous subscriber location attacks have been demonstrated against AKA, some of which have been fixed or mitigated in the enhanced AKA protocol designed for 5G. In this paper, we reveal a new privacy attack against all variants of the AKA protocol, including 5G AKA, that breaches subscriber privacy more severely than known location privacy attacks do. Our attack exploits a new logical vulnerability we uncovered that would require dedicated fixes. We demonstrate the practical feasibility of our attack using low cost and widely available setups. Finally we conduct a security analysis of the vulnerability and discuss countermeasures to remedy our attack.

Mobile communication networks connect much of the world's population. The security of users' calls, SMSs, and mobile data depends on the guarantees provided by the Authenticated Key Exchange protocols used. For the next-generation network (5G), the 3GPP group has standardized the 5G AKA protocol for this purpose. We provide the first comprehensive formal model of a protocol from the AKA family: 5G AKA. We also extract precise requirements from the 3GPP standards defining 5G and we identify missing security goals. Using the security protocol verification tool Tamarin, we conduct a full, systematic, security evaluation of the model with respect to the 5G security goals. Our automated analysis identifies the minimal security assumptions required for each security goal and we find that some critical security goals are not met, except under additional assumptions missing from the standard. Finally, we make explicit recommendations with provably secure fixes for the attacks and weaknesses we found.

Exclusive-or (XOR) operations are common in cryptographic protocols, in particular in RFID protocols and electronic payment protocols. Although there are numerous applications, due to the inherent complexity of faithful models of XOR, there is only limited tool support for the verification of cryptographic protocols using XOR. The Tamarin prover is a state-of-the-art verification tool for cryptographic protocols in the symbolic model. In this paper, we improve the underlying theory and the tool to deal with an equational theory modeling XOR operations. The XOR theory can be freely combined with all equational theories previously supported, including user-defined equational theories. This makes Tamarin the first tool to support simultaneously this large set of equational theories, protocols with global mutable state, an unbounded number of sessions, and complex security properties including observational equivalence. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by analyzing several protocols that rely on XOR, in particular multiple RFID-protocols, where we can identify attacks as well as provide proofs.

Many privacy-type properties of security protocols can be modelled using trace equivalence properties in suitable process algebras. It has been shown that such properties can be decided for interesting classes of finite processes (i.e., without replication) by means of symbolic execution and constraint solving. However, this does not suffice to obtain practical tools. Current prototypes suffer from a classical combinatorial explosion problem caused by the exploration of many interleavings in the behaviour of processes. M\"odersheim et al. have tackled this problem for reachability properties using partial order reduction techniques. We revisit their work, generalize it and adapt it for equivalence checking. We obtain an optimisation in the form of a reduced symbolic semantics that eliminates redundant interleavings on the fly. The obtained partial order reduction technique has been integrated in a tool called APTE. We conducted complete benchmarks showing dramatic improvements.

Modal μ-calculus is one of the central languages of logic and verification, whose study involves notoriously complex objects: automata over infinite structures on the model-theoretical side; infinite proofs and proofs by (co)induction on the proof-theoretical side. Nevertheless, axiomatizations have been given for both linear and branching time μ-calculi, with quite involved completeness arguments. We come back to this central problem, considering it from a proof search viewpoint, and provide some new completeness arguments in the linear time μ-calculus. Our results only deal with restricted classes of formulas that closely correspond to (non-alternating) ω-automata but, compared to earlier proofs, our completeness arguments are direct and constructive. We first consider a natural circular proof system based on sequent calculus, and show that it is complete for inclusions of parity automata expressed as formulas, making use of Safra's construction directly in proof search. We then consider the corresponding finitary proof system, featuring (co)induction rules, and provide a partial translation result from circular to finitary proofs. This yields completeness of the finitary proof system for inclusions of sufficiently deterministic parity automata, and finally for arbitrary Büchi automata.

In this paper, we consider the problem of verifying anonymity and unlinkability in the symbolic model, where protocols are represented as processes in a variant of the applied pi calculus notably used in the ProVerif tool. Existing tools and techniques do not allow one to verify directly these properties, expressed as behavioral equivalences. We propose a different approach: we design two conditions on protocols which are sufficient to ensure anonymity and unlinkability, and which can then be effectively checked automatically using ProVerif. Our two conditions correspond to two broad classes of attacks on unlinkability, corresponding to data and control-flow leaks. This theoretical result is general enough to apply to a wide class of protocols. In particular, we apply our techniques to provide the first formal security proof of the BAC protocol (e-passport). Our work has also lead to the discovery of new attacks, including one on the LAK protocol (RFID authentication) which was previously claimed to be unlinkable (in a weak sense) and one on the PACE protocol (e-passport).

Security protocols are concurrent processes that communicate using cryptography with the aim of achieving various security properties. Recent work on their formal verification has brought procedures and tools for deciding trace equivalence properties (e.g. anonymity, unlinkability, vote secrecy) for a bounded number of sessions. However, these procedures are based on a naive symbolic exploration of all traces of the considered processes which, unsurprisingly, greatly limits the scalability and practical impact of the verification tools. In this paper, we mitigate this difficulty by developing partial order reduction techniques for the verification of security protocols. We provide reduced transition systems that optimally eliminate redundant traces, and which are adequate for model-checking trace equivalence properties of protocols by means of symbolic execution. We have implemented our reductions in the tool Apte, and demonstrated that it achieves the expected speedup on various protocols.