Attack Interference in Non-Collaborative Scenarios for Security Protocol Analysis [Extended Version]

TL;DR

This paper explores how multiple non-collaborating attackers can interfere with each other in security protocols, and proposes leveraging this interference as a novel defense mechanism, contrasting with traditional single-attacker models.

Contribution

It introduces a formal framework for multi-attacker scenarios and demonstrates how attack interference can be exploited to enhance protocol security.

Findings

Concurrent attacks can interfere with each other.

Attack interference can be exploited for protocol defense.

Multiple attackers are necessary to observe interference effects.

Abstract

In security protocol analysis, the traditional choice to consider a single Dolev-Yao attacker is supported by the fact that models with multiple collaborating Dolev-Yao attackers have been shown to be reducible to models with one Dolev-Yao attacker. In this paper, we take a fundamentally different approach and investigate the case of multiple non-collaborating attackers. After formalizing the framework for multi-attacker scenarios, we show with a case study that concurrent competitive attacks can interfere with each other. We then present a new strategy to defend security protocols, based on active exploitation of attack interference. The paper can be seen as providing two proof-of-concept results: (i) it is possible to exploit interference to mitigate protocol vulnerabilities, thus providing a form of protection to protocols; (ii) the search for defense strategies requires scenarios with at least two attackers.