Goal-Oriented Software Security Engineering: The Electronic Smart Card Case Study

The use of formal methods has long been advocated in the development of secure systems. Yet, methods for deriving design from requirements that guarantee retention of the intended security properties remain largely unrealized on a repeatable and consistent basis. We present the FADES (Formal Analysis and Design approach for Engineering Security) that integrates KAOS (Knowledge Acquisition in autOmated Specifications) with the B specification language to derive security design specifications and further implementation from security requirements. We demonstrate the capability of the approach to handle changes to security requirements by introducing corrective changes to the security requirements of a case study, the spy network system. The objective is to bridge the gap between formal requirements and design for security requirements. Our initial results show promise with FADES in preserving security properties and detecting security vulnerabilities early during requirements. Encouraged by these, we are more quantitatively assessing the FADES capabilities.

Formal security analysis of LoRaWAN

In the last few years, technological advancement has led to the use of wearable body sensors for gathering patient information. Wireless body area networks played an essential role in the modern medical era. Through wearable body sensors, patient data are sent to medical professionals in real-time without any hindrance. This information moves through the public channel, and thus proper security and protection are needed because of its sensitiveness. Many authentication protocols proposed for solving these issues were neither secure nor cost-effective. This paper proposed an authentication protocol using certificateless cryptography for wireless body area networks to resolve the associated security concerns. A formal security analysis is done using the Burrows–Abadi–Needham logic shows that the proposed protocol is resilient against prevailing attacks. Additionally, we employ the Real-or-Random model for mathematical proof and Automated Verification Security Protocol and Analysis simulation tool for security analysis. A detailed comprehensive comparison with the existing protocols indicates that the proposed protocol is cost-effective with improved functionality.

An exercise in formal specification and design of an asynchronous controller that leads to the CMOS implementation is presented. In this paper we focus on the formal specification of the controller by using communication sequential process, a tool based on Hoare's CSP. We also present the procedure, based on Martin's synthesis method, used to formally derive the preliminary design of the asynchronous traffic light controller. The formal specification and circuit implementation are formally verified with a verification tool package STTools, capable of model checking and simulating programs.

FAPI 2.0 is a suite of Web protocols developed by the OpenID Foundation’s FAPI Working Group (FAPI WG) for third-party data sharing and digital identity in high-risk environments. Even though the specifications are not completely finished, several important entities have started to adopt the FAPI 2.0 protocols, including Norway’s national HelseID, Australia’s Consumer Data Standards, as well as private companies like Authlete and Australia-based connectID; the predecessor FAPI 1.0 is in widespread use with millions of users. The FAPI WG asked us to accompany the standardization of the FAPI 2.0 protocols with a formal security analysis to proactively identify vulnerabilities before widespread deployment and to provide formal security guarantees for the standards. In this paper, we report on our analysis and findings. Our analysis is based on a detailed model of the Web infrastructure, the so-called Web Infrastructure Model (WIM), which we extend to be able to carry out our analysis of the FAPI 2.0 protocols including important extensions like FAPI-CIBA. Based on the (extended) WIM and formalizations of the security goals and attacker model laid out in the FAPI 2.0 specifications, we provide a formal model of the protocols and carry out a formal security analysis, revealing several attacks. We have worked with the FAPI WG to fix the protocols, resulting in several amendments to the specifications. With these changes in place, we have adjusted our protocol model and formally proved that the security properties hold true under the strong attacker model defined by the FAPI WG.

Present design processes for satellite networks mainly involve interconnected system models and their parameter-based simulations without emphasizing high level requirements in the process. What is missing is a systems engineering approach and a system of verification and validation based on formal representation and analysis. We propose a systems design methodology for inter-satellite communication based on the Responsive and Formal Design (RFD) [1]-[3], which addresses the need for a model-based system engineering approach coupled with a system of validation and verification based on formal representation and analysis. The goal is to apply the RFD process to provide a solution for the Inter-Satellite Communications (ISC) problem within the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) framework. The OSI represents a standard framework for communication between devices. It divides the communication process into seven layers, with each one providing well-defined functions and services. We will address the integration of the RFD process with the OSI framework for ISC. The RFD process involves levels of design abstraction and refinement which correspond to layers or groups of layers of the OSI model. The process illustrates how the complete framework for ISC unfolds in an iterative manner.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to focus the application of design of experiments (DOE) using industrial equipments, reinforcing idea that non‐statistical aspects in planning and conducting experiments are so important as formal design and analysis.Design/methodology/approachTwo case studies are presented to illustrate typical industrial applications and difficulties. Supported on these case studies and literature, this paper presents guidelines to planning, conducting and analysis involving technical and organizational aspects.FindingsSolving problems in industry, including in companies recognized as competent in the respective industrial sector, is not just a question of applying the right technique. Ceramic industry case study illustrates how important are non‐statistical issues in DOE application. Paint industry case study illustrates the strong relationship of the results with incorporating presented guidelines into practice. Moreover, both case studies consolidating a fundamental advantage of DOE: experimentation provides more knowledge about products, processes and technologies, even in unsuccessful case studies.Research limitations/implicationsUnsuccessful cases studies are very useful for identifying pitfalls and others limitations. This paper highlight difficulties aroused from non‐statistical aspects, although it is possible to find unsuccessful case studies due to statistical issues also. So, papers illustrating inadequate application of statistical techniques are welcome.Practical implicationsSuccessful DOE implementation depends on statistical and non‐statistical aspects. Although none of them shall be neglected, technical skills and technological knowledge about processes and products, management understanding of potential possibilities of statistical techniques and statistical fundamentals and knowledge about techniques of DOE must be ensuring to successful case studies in industrial setting.Originality/valueThis paper highlights non‐statistical aspects instead of the statistical ones. Tob overcome difficulties structured guidelines were designed to support DOE application in industrial setting.

Radio‐frequency identification (RFID) technology has proliferated over the last few years and being deployed as identification technology in numerous domains like intelligent transportation systems (ITS) and Internet of Vehicles (IoV) for applications like road safety, efficient traffic management, automatic toll collection, intelligent parking, etc. As RFID devices, as well as the possible domains of ITS and IoV onto which the RFID technology can be deployed, are usually resource‐constrained, thus, security and privacy become a major concern. So, public‐key cryptography becomes the better choice for enhancing the security of RFID based systems. Elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) is one of the dominant and secure asymmetric‐key cryptosystems being used for RFID security due to its smaller key size. Numerous RFID authentication schemes based on ECC have been suggested in literature, however, the majority has various serious security weaknesses. To bridge those existing security weaknesses, an enhanced ECC based light weight protocol for RFID systems has been proposed in this article. An extensive security analysis has been performed to demonstrate various secure features offered by our proposed protocol, and formal security analysis is being conducted using Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications tool. The performance of our proposed RFID protocol has been compared with various existing RFID based security solutions on the basis of parameters, that is, computational cost, communication cost, and storage requirement. Simulation results indicate that the proposed lightweight protocol is more secure and performance efficient than the existing RFID protocols, and is well suited for practical applications.

Current practice in simulation and implementation of robot controllers is usually undertaken with guidance from high-level design diagrams and pseudocode. Thus, no rigorous connection between the design and the development of a robot controller is established. This paper presents a framework for designing robotic controllers with support for automatic generation of executable code and automatic property checking. A state-machine based notation, RoboChart, and a tool (RoboTool) that implements the automatic generation of code and mathematical models from the designed controllers are presented. We demonstrate the application of RoboChart and its related tool through a case study of a robot performing an exploration task. The automatically generated code is platform independent and is used in both simulation and two different physical robotic platforms. Properties are formally checked against the mathematical models generated by RoboTool, and further validated in the actual simulations and physical experiments. The tool not only provides engineers with a way of designing robotic controllers formally but also paves the way for correct implementation of robotic systems.

Unforeseen safety and security failures in complex software-intensive systems arise due to hidden dependencies between system components and artifacts. These stem from stakeholder misunderstanding of system artifact and component interactions. In most systems, artifacts are defined and described, and components are designed, implemented, and combined by engineers in multiple disciplines. Also, artifacts are described in places separated by hundreds of pages or files and in different domain and description languages, including natural, graphical, and domain-specific languages. Hence, it is of primary importance, but also currently extremely difficult, to discover these hidden dependencies. To help engineers find these dependencies, and hence better foresee erroneous interactions, an approach that enables and promotes a holistic, hierarchical, and incremental description of a system is needed. In this article, we introduce EXMPLRAD. EXMPLRAD is a human-centered language that enables the description and integration of informal and formal requirements, architectural and design descriptions, source code, and configuration artifacts, and their relationships in a format that resembles code. A holistic system model described using EXMPLRAD enables the creation and application of methods for the automatic discovery of hidden dependencies. We demonstrate this with a case study that analyzes the seL4 microkernel's Inter- Process Communication subsystem including the modeling of its requirements, architecture, and source code in C.

Recently, in 2013, Wu et al. proposed an efficient adaptable and scalable group access control scheme (GAC) for managing wireless sensor networks and they claimed that their proposed GAC approach provides the forward secrecy and backward secrecy, and it also prevents the man-in-the-middle attack. However, in this paper, we revisit Wu et al.'s scheme and show that Wu et al.'s scheme fails to provide the forward and backward secrecy to the group access key (GAK), and also their scheme does not prevent the man-in-the-middle attack and it does not provide the mutual authentication between a node and the task manager. Moreover, in Wu et al.'s scheme, all the past GAKs used by a node can be revealed to an adversary when that node is compromised. We then aim to propose a novel group access control mechanism to withstand the security weaknesses found in Wu et al.'s scheme while retaining the original merits of their scheme. Through the rigorous informal security analysis and the formal security analysis using the widely-accepted Burrows---Abadi---Needham logic, we show that our scheme is secure against various known attacks including the attacks found in Wu et al.'s scheme. Moreover, in our scheme, the vulnerability of the GAKs used by a node is limited and bounded to the last GAK update protocol interval when that node is compromised by an adversary. Our scheme provides efficient dynamic properties such as joining and leaving of a node from a group along with high security and the required desirable features as compared to Wu et al.'s scheme, and as a result, our scheme is very suitable for the practical applications.

Traditional Physical Unclonable Function (PUF)-based authentication protocols are vulnerable to machine learning attacks and evolving cyber threats. Moreover, these protocols lack suitability for resource-constrained IoT devices due to the involvement of heavy cryptographic primitives, error correction modules, and significant computational overhead. This article proposes a mutual authentication protocol and session key agreement utilizing commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) SRAM integrated circuits (ICs) to extract a secret key. We introduce a block-based lightweight fuzzy extractor to minimize the overhead associated with error correction modules on IoT devices. Our protocol relies only hash, XOR and masking functions for the identity verification for both parties and stores only one challenge-response pair (CRP) on the server, reducing memory overhead on the authentication server. In addition, we perform a rigorous informal security analysis against well-known attacks and formal security analysis using Verifpal tool considering an active attacker in the communication link. Furthermore, the performance evaluation and comparative analysis indicate that the proposed protocol significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art protocols in terms of communication, computational overhead, storage overhead, and energy consumption by up to 69%, 81%, 87.5% and 76.6% respectively. We have implemented the proposed authentication protocol on ESP32 and Raspberry Pi 3 boards to show its applicability and scalability in a real-world IoT framework.

A smart contract-based robotic surgery authentication system for healthcare using 6G-Tactile Internet

Internet of Things (IoT) is an expanding technology that facilitate physical devices to inter-connect each other over a public channel. Moreover, the security of the next-generation wireless mobile communication technology, namely 5G with IoT, has been a field of much interest among researchers in the last several years. Previously, Sharif et al. had suggested an IoTbased lightweight three-party authentication scheme proclaiming a secured scheme against different threats. However, it was found that the scheme could not achieve user anonymity and guarantee session key security. Additionally, the scheme fails to provide proper authentication in the login phase, and it s unable to update a new password in the password change phase. Thus, we propose an improved three-factor-based data transmission authentication scheme (TDTAS) to address the weaknesses. The formal security analysis has been proved using the Real-or-Random (RoR) model. The informal security analysis demonstrates that the scheme is secure against several known attacks and achieves more security features. In addition, the comparison of the work with other related schemes demonstrates the proposed scheme has less communicational and storage costs.

In recent times, the Internet of Things (IoT) becomes one of the most popular innovations in the field of information and Communication Technology (ICT), and it connects billions or even trillions of devices. Meanwhile, security and privacy stand as a vital issue in the IoT environment, which generates the need for an efficient authentication protocol. In this context, we proposed a lightweight authentication protocol for cloud-based IoT applications. Further, formal security analysis using Burrows-Abadi-Needham (BAN) logic and informal security analysis of the proposed scheme are discussed. A comparative study of the proposed protocol and some existing methods is also demonstrated considering computation, communication, and storage cost. Finally, the proposed scheme is verified using a widely accepted AVISPA tool. The comparative study and verification support the efficiency of the proposed protocol for cloud-based IoT applications.