A formal methodology for integral security design and verification of network protocols

TL;DR

This paper introduces a formal, iterative methodology for verifying security properties of network protocols during design, enabling efficient flaw detection and validation through both informal and formal verification steps.

Contribution

It presents a novel structured approach combining informal and formal verification for network protocol security, demonstrated on real-world protocols.

Findings

Early flaw detection reduces verification effort

Methodology effectively identifies security flaws in protocols

Applied successfully to three real protocols

Abstract

We propose a methodology for verifying security properties of network protocols at design level. It can be separated in two main parts: context and requirements analysis and informal verification; and formal representation and procedural verification. It is an iterative process where the early steps are simpler than the last ones. Therefore, the effort required for detecting flaws is proportional to the complexity of the associated attack. Thus, we avoid wasting valuable resources for simple flaws that can be detected early in the verification process. In order to illustrate the advantages provided by our methodology, we also analyze three real protocols.