Verification Across Intellectual Property Boundaries

TL;DR

This paper introduces a cryptographic protocol enabling third-party software verification across intellectual property boundaries, balancing supplier IP protection with customer verification needs.

Contribution

It presents a novel protocol using cryptographic primitives that allows verification without source code disclosure, ensuring security and practicality.

Findings

Protocol is both secure and practically implementable.

Cryptographic reduction proofs establish protocol correctness.

Applicable to existing verification tool chains.

Abstract

In many industries, the importance of software components provided by third-party suppliers is steadily increasing. As the suppliers seek to secure their intellectual property (IP) rights, the customer usually has no direct access to the suppliers' source code, and is able to enforce the use of verification tools only by legal requirements. In turn, the supplier has no means to convince the customer about successful verification without revealing the source code. This paper presents an approach to resolve the conflict between the IP interests of the supplier and the quality interests of the customer. We introduce a protocol in which a dedicated server (called the "amanat") is controlled by both parties: the customer controls the verification task performed by the amanat, while the supplier controls the communication channels of the amanat to ensure that the amanat does not leak information about the source code. We argue that the protocol is both practically useful and mathematically sound. As the protocol is based on well-known (and relatively lightweight) cryptographic primitives, it allows a straightforward implementation on top of existing verification tool chains. To substantiate our security claims, we establish the correctness of the protocol by cryptographic reduction proofs.