Towards a Data Centric Approach for the Design and Verification of Cryptographic Protocols

TL;DR

MetaCP introduces a user-friendly, graphical, data-centric tool that simplifies the design and verification of cryptographic protocols, integrating seamlessly with formal verification back-ends like Tamarin.

Contribution

It presents a novel, easy-to-use graphical interface and XML-based protocol specification that enhances accessibility and flexibility in cryptographic protocol verification.

Findings

MetaCP enables quick protocol design and verification.

The tool integrates with Tamarin prover for formal verification.

It offers a low learning curve for non-experts.

Abstract

We propose MetaCP, a Meta Cryptography Protocol verification tool, as an automated tool simplifying the design of security protocols through a graphical interface. The graphical interface can be seen as a modern editor of a non-relational database whose data are protocols. The information of protocols are stored in XML, enjoying a fixed format and syntax aiming to contain all required information to specify any kind of protocol. This XML can be seen as an almost semanticless language, where different plugins confer strict semantics modelling the protocol into a variety of back-end verification languages. In this paper, we showcase the effectiveness of this novel approach by demonstrating how easy MetaCP makes it to design and verify a protocol going from the graphical design to formally verified protocol using a Tamarin prover plugin. Whilst similar approaches have been proposed in the past, most famously the AVISPA Tool, no previous approach provides such as small learning curve and ease of use even for non security professionals, combined with the flexibility to integrate with the state of the art verification tools.