Insecurity, going from terms to formulas
Abstract: Reasoning about cryptographic protocols starts with a term algebra of communicated terms over which an appropriate logic is built, with variables designating terms. In logics of announcements, formulas are communicated, blurring the distinction between terms and formulas. Constructs such as zero knowledge proofs and certificates are akin to formulas, motivating a similar extension to reasoning about security protocols as well. However, the interaction between equality and the existential quantifier leads to interesting twists: witnesses for existential quantifiers may be unbounded, and obtaining small witness terms while maintaining equality proofs complicates the analysis considerably. In this talk we attempt to highlight the challenges in reasoning about insecurity when formulas are communicated.
This work is joint with Vaishnavi Sundararajan and S P Suresh.
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Reversing, Breaking, and Fixing the French Legislative Election E-Voting Protocol
In June 2022, French citizens abroad voted online during the French legislatives election to chose the new members of Parliament. In this work, we conducted a security analysis of the system under use. Due to a lack of system and threat model specifications, we first built and contributed such specifications by studying the French legal framework and by reverse-engineering the code base accessible to the voters. Our analysis reveals that this protocol is affected by two design-level and implementation-level vulnerabilities. We show how those allow a standard voting server attacker and even more so a channel attacker to defeat the election integrity and ballot privacy. We propose and discuss fixes to prevent those attacks. Our specifications, the attacks, and the fixes were acknowledged by the relevant stakeholders during our responsible disclosure. Beyond this specific protocol, we draw general conclusions and lessons from this instructive experience where an e-voting protocol meets the real-world constraints of a large-scale and political election.
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Blackbox and Grey-box Approaches to Protocol State Machine Learning (With Lots of Attacks Against TLS and WPA)
Protocol state machine learning has been used to analyse many cryptographic protocols. Unlike fuzzing it can find logical flaws in protocols and unlike formal modelling it can find vulnerabilities in implementations. I will outline how black box state machine methods work, and describe how we have applied them to WPA to find two downgrade attacks. I will then describe a grey box learning method we have developed that uses memory snapshots and symbolic execution of the binary, combined with observations of run-time memory and a protocol’s inputs and outputs to learn its state machine. We show that this grey box method is much more efficient than black box learning, allowing us to test protocols in much more detail and leading to the discovery of new attacks against implementations of TLS and WPA.
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(In)Security of e-exams
In this talk I will present our works on e-exams. We have proposed a formal framework for e-exams. In this context we have been able to define several security properties. Some of these properties have been checked on existing protocols of the literature using automatic tools like Proverif.
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Symbolic protocol verification with dice: process equivalences in the presence of probabilities
Abstract: Symbolic protocol verification generally abstracts probabilities away, considering computations that succeed only with negligible probability, such as guessing random numbers or breaking an encryption scheme, as impossible. This abstraction, sometimes referred to as the perfect cryptography assumption, has shown very useful as it simplifies automation of the analysis. However, probabilities may also appear in the control flow where they are generally not negligible. In this paper we consider a framework for symbolic protocol analysis with a probabilistic choice operator: the probabilistic applied pi calculus. We define and explore the relationships between several behavioral equivalences. In particular we show the need for randomized schedulers and exhibit a counter-example to a result in a previous work that relied on non-randomized ones. As in other frameworks that mix both non-deterministic and probabilistic choices, schedulers may sometimes be unrealistically powerful. We therefore consider two subclasses of processes that avoid this problem. In particular,…
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A little more conversation, a little less action, a lot more satisfaction: Global states in ProVerif
ProVerif is a popular tool for the fully automatic analysis of security protocols, offering very good support to detect flaws or prove security. One exception is the case of protocols with global states such as counters, tables, or more generally, memory cells. ProVerif fails to analyse such protocols, due to its internal abstraction.
In the original paper of GSVerif, our key idea was to devise a generic transformation of the security properties queried to ProVerif. We proved the soundness of our transformation and implemented it into a front-end GSVerif. Our experiments showed that our front-end (combined with ProVerif) outperforms the few existing tools, both in terms of efficiency and protocol coverage. We successfully applied our tool to a dozen of protocols of the literature, yielding the first fully automatic proof of a security API and a payment protocol of the literature.
In the newest version of ProVerif, the generic transformations of GSVerif can be fully described in term of axioms, thus taking advantage of this new ProVerif feature.
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Managing our online account security
The number of online services, accounts, apps, and devices that we use is constantly increasing and so is the complexity of the interconnections between them. These interconnections have been exploited in targeted attacks that range from account takeovers to cryptocurrency theft. Protecting users from such attacks is difficult because each user’s account ecosystem is individual.
In this talk I will introduce account access graphs which are a formal model to represent a user’s account ecosystem, i.e., the collection of accounts, apps, and devices, as well as their interconnections. I will show examples of account access graphs from our user studies and present some of the insights we have gained from them. I will then discuss some of the challenges we must overcome in order to build an account management tool aimed at empowering users to better protect their individual account ecosystem.
This talk is based on joint work published at CCS 2019, CHI 2022 and carried out at ETH Zurich, the University of Dundee and Heriot-Watt University.
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[Joint FM-SEC talk] The security protocol verifier ProVerif and its recent improvements: lemmas, induction, fast subsumption, and much more
ProVerif is a widely used automatic security protocol verifier that relies on symbolic model of cryptography. It can prove various security properties (secrecy, correspondences, some equivalences) for an unbounded number of sessions, as well as find attacks. In this talk, we will present an overview of ProVerif and its recent improvements. These improvements are twofold. First, we extended ProVerif with lemmas, axioms, proofs by induction, natural numbers, and temporal queries. These features not only extend the scope of ProVerif, but can also be used to improve its precision (that is, avoid false attacks) and make it terminate more often. Second, we reworked and optimized many of the algorithms used in ProVerif (generation of clauses, resolution, subsumption, …), resulting in impressive speed-ups on large examples. These improvements are joint work with Vincent Cheval and Véronique Cortier, to appear at IEEE Security and Privacy 2022. Joint talk with the FM-SEC network. Zoom…
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Towards a High-Assurance and Specification-Compliant X.509 PKI Implementation
The X.509 Public-Key Infrastructure (PKI) is one of the most prominent and widely used authentication mechanisms, which plays a crucial role in different applications such as secure communication (e.g., SSL/TLS, IPSec), software updates, and emails. Flaws in an X.509 PKI implementation can make an application relying on X.509 PKI susceptible to impersonation attacks or interoperability issues. In this talk, I will discuss my group’s effort in developing a high-assurance and specification-compliant implementation of X.509 PKI.
First, I will discuss the Symcerts system that uses domain-specific optimizations, symbolic execution, and differential analysis to automatically identify specification non-compliance in open-source SSL/TLS libraries. Second, I will discuss Morpheus, a black-box analysis engine, that automatically checks the logical correctness of RSA signature verification implementations in open-source SSL/TLS libraries through a formally verified oracle. Third, I will discuss my group’s effort to formalize and re-engineer the specification of the X.509 certificate chain validation using an executable specification. I will conclude my talk with a sneak peek of our ongoing work on developing a formally verified implementation of the X.509 PKI.
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InSpectre: Breaking and Fixing Microarchitectural Vulnerabilities by Formal Analysis
The Spectre attacks have demonstrated the fundamental insecurity of current computer microarchitecture. The attacks use features like pipelining, out-of-order and speculation to extract arbitrary information about the memory contents of a process. A comprehensive formal microarchitectural model capable of representing the forms of out-of-order and speculative behavior that can meaningfully be implemented in a high performance pipelined architecture has not yet emerged. Such a model would be very useful, as it would allow the existence and non-existence of vulnerabilities, and soundness of countermeasures to be formally established. We present such a model targeting single core processors. The model is intentionally very general and provides an infrastructure to define models of real CPUs. It incorporates microarchitectural features that underpin all known Spectre vulnerabilities. We use the model to elucidate the security of existing and new vulnerabilities, as well as to formally analyze the effectiveness of proposed countermeasures. Specifically,we discover three new (potential) vulnerabilities, including a new variant of Spectre v4, a vulnerability on speculative fetching, and a vulnerability on out-of-order execution, and analyze the effectiveness of existing countermeasures including constant time and serializing instructions.
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