Integrating Formal Analysis and Design to Preserve Security Properties

We advocate goal-oriented software security engineering to produce highly secure software in a constructive,provable and cost-effective manner. Our approach is to couple goal-oriented semi-formal requirements specifications with formal design and implementation. To this effect, we proposed FADES (formal analysis and design for engineering security)in as the first goal-oriented software security engineering approach that provides a systematic and automated bridge between the goal-directed semi-formal KAOS (knowledge acquisition for automated specifications) framework and the B formal method to derive formal design and implementation from security requirements. In this paper, we demonstrate the applicability of FADES and study its effectiveness through a generic Electronic Smart Card case study and a comparative analysis between FADES and strictly applying formal methods.We use the case study to demonstrate how the goal-oriented formulation of security requirements in FADES paves the way for formal design that provably preserves the security properties.Further, the results of the comparison between FADES and Z show that FADES achieves better requirements completeness,consistency and security quality.

Engineering secure software remains a significant challenge for today's software organizations as they struggle to understand the implications of security o the system and develop systems that guarantee specified software security properties. Despite many software engineering advances, current methods for deriving a design from a set of requirements that guarantee the retention of the intended security properties remains difficult and often unachievable. If security requirements are formalized and transformed into design using formal methods, the result would reduce the potential for security vulnerabilities through better clarity, completeness, and consistency. To this end, we outline a requirements-driven security engineering approach for deriving design specifications from security requirements that guarantee security properties specified in requirements are retained. We build on the goal-oriented KAOS (Knowledge Acquisition in autOmated Specifications) framework to formally construct a complete, consistent, and clear security requirements model. The resulting model is then transformed to the B language to derive security design specifications. Using B enables us to further implement the design while preserving requirements relevant security properties. Using the B refinement mechanism, we generate design specifications and ultimately implementation. The approach treats security-specific elements in a systematic and constructive way while considering security early in the development lifecycle with assurance of completeness, consistency and clarity throughout the development. Moreover, our approach allows for requirement traceability at the various phases of development that helps security evaluators to have more confidence in the target of evaluation.

Security has become an important concern with the development of large scale distributed and heterogeneous multi-agent systems (MAS). One of the main problems in addressing security during the development of MAS is that security is often an afterthought. The cost involved to patch existing systems against vulnerabilities and attacks after deployment is high. If developers and designers can spend some quality time investigating security aspects before beginning to code then this cost can be reduced significantly. Also, using formal methods to specify the complex behavior of large scale software systems has resulted in reliable software systems. This research effort was focused on using formal methods early in the development lifecycle to specify security requirements for MAS. New solutions are emerging to fix security related issues, but how much thought gets in during the early phases of development in terms of security needs to be answered. In this paper, analysis of security requirements for MAS, existing solutions to secure MAS, and the use of formal methods to specify security requirements has been studied. Descartes-Agent, a formal specification language for specifying agent systems has been taken into study to model the security requirements of MAS early on in the development process. Functional specifications of MAS are modelled along with the non-functional security requirements using the Descartes-Agent specification language. This paper also describes the extensions made to the Agent Unified Modeling Language (AUML) to represent the security requirements of MAS. The extensions proposed to AUML are in accordance with the extensions made to the Descartes-Agent specification language. A case study example is used to illustrate the specification of security requirements in MAS using the Descartes-Agent.

Formal security analysis of LoRaWAN

With the Telecare Medical Information System (TMIS), patients and doctors can access various healthcare services through wireless communication technology without visiting the hospital in person. However, TMIS must have the necessary security requirements, including authentication and anonymity because information of legitimate patient is transmitted via an open channel. Therefore, secure privacy-preserving schemes are essential to ensure reliable healthcare services for legitimate patient in TMIS. Recently, the existing schemes proposed a secure healthcare authentication protocol with attack-resilience and anonymous key agreement in TMIS environments. However, we demonstrate that their scheme cannot prevent impersonation, session key disclosure, and man-in-the-middle attacks and cannot ensure secure mutual authentication. To improve the security flaws of the existing schemes, we design a secure, anonymous, and lightweight privacy-preserving scheme in internet of medical things (IoMT)-enabled TMIS environments, called SALS-TMIS. Our scheme withstands potential security threats and ensures the essential security functionalities. We evaluate the security of the SALS-TMIS using informal and formal security analyses, including ROR oracle model and AVISPA implementation. We then compare the computation and communication costs of SALS-TMIS with existing schemes. SALS-TMIS provides superior security and efficiency than related schemes for IoMT-enabled TMIS.

Wireless medical sensor networks (WMSNs)-based medical systems are an emerging paradigm of the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) in which the patients and doctors can access various healthcare services via wireless communication technology without visiting the hospital in person. However, an adversary attempts a variety of security attacks because the sensitive information in various fields is exchanged via an insecure channel. Thus, robust and lightweight authentication protocols are essential for providing dependable healthcare services in WMSN-based medical systems. Recently, Wang et al. (IEEE Internet of Things Journal, doi: 10.1109/JIOT.2021.3117762) proposed blockchain and physically unclonable functions (PUFs)-based lightweight authentication protocol for WMSN. They claimed that their protocol is resistant to cyber and physical security threats and also does provide necessary security requirements. However, we prove that their protocol is vulnerable to various security attacks, such as man-in-the-middle and session key disclosure attacks and also lacks mutual authentication. As a result, we propose a robust authentication protocol for WMSN using blockchain and PUF to address the security problems raised by Wang et al.’s scheme. we assess the security of the proposed scheme by using informal and formal security analyses, such as AVISPA simulation and the ROR oracle model. Furthermore, we present the testbed experiments using Raspberry PI 4 based on MIRACL Crypto SDK. Then, we show the performance of the enhanced scheme compared with related schemes based on testbed experiments. Consequently, our scheme is better suited for practical WMSN-based medical systems because it provides greater security and efficiency than competing schemes.

Enforcing security properties in a Cloud is a difficult task, which requires expertise. However, it is not the only security-related challenge met by a company migrating to a Cloud environment. Indeed, the tenant must also have assurance that the requested security properties have effectively been enforced. Therefore, the Cloud provider has to offer a way of monitoring the security. In this paper, we present a solution to express the assurance properties based on the security requirements of the tenant and to deploy these assurance properties. First, we introduce a language that expresses the assurance based on the tenant's security requirements. Secondly, we propose an infrastructure that deploys the assurance in a Cloud environment. This solution aims to be easy to use: the assurance directly results from the high-level expression of the tenant's security requirements, and no additional action is needed from the tenant. Consequently, we address one of the greatest drawback of security and assurance - the complexity of their configuration - while providing a complete assurance mechanism.

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.

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.

In this paper, we discuss the security issue in wireless home network (WHN) and give solution. First, we summarize the security threats and requirements of WHN, and analyze the characteristics of WHN and their influences to the design of security mechanisms. Then, based on the security threats and requirements that we have analyzed, we introduce some security mechanisms to protect the WHN. Furthermore, some alternative mechanisms are proposed for the variety of devices to choose according to their security requirements and capabilities, for example, the security delegation service (SDS) provides an efficient solution for wireless devices with low computation capability and resources to use the widely applied security protocols such as LPSEC and TLS. Finally, the security analysis is presented to demonstrate that the proposed security mechanisms are robust and efficient to secure the WHN.

Developing security-critical systems is difficult and there are many well-known examples of security weaknesses exploited in practice. Thus a sound methodology supporting secure systems development is urgently needed.We present an extensible verification framework for verifying UML models for security requirements. In particular, it includes various plugins performing different security analyses on models of the security extension UMLsec of UML. Here, we concentrate on an automated theorem prover binding to verify security properties of UMLsec models which make use of cryptography (such as cryptographic protocols). The work aims to contribute towards usage of UML for secure systems development in practice by offering automated analysis routines connected to popular CASE tools. We present an example of such an application where our approach found and corrected several serious design flaws in an industrial biometric authentication system.

A System of Systems (SoS) is a term used to describe independent systems converging for a purpose that could only be carried out through this interdependent collaboration. Many examples of SoSs exist, but the term has become a source of confusion across domains. Moreover, there are few illustrative SoS examples demonstrating their initial classification and structure. While there are many approaches for engineering of systems, less exist for SoS engineering. More specifically, there is a research gap towards approaches addressing SoS security risk assessment for engineering and operational needs, with a need for tool-support to assist modelling and visualising security risk and requirements in an interconnected SoS. From this, security requirements can provide a systematic means to identify constraints and related risks of the SoS, mitigated by human-user and system requirements. This work investigates specific challenges and current approaches for SoS security and risk, and aims to identify the alignment of SoS factors and concepts suitable for eliciting, analysing, validating risks with use of a tool-support for assessing security risk in the SoS context.

Vehicular network technology has made substantial advancements in recent years in the field of Intelligent Transportation Systems. Vehicular Cloud Computing (VCC) has emerged as a novel paradigm with a substantial increase in data exchange within Vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs). VCC integrates cloud computing, vehicular networking, and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies. It enables Infrastructure-to-Vehicle (I2V), Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V), and Vehicle-to-Device (V2D) communication. VCC optimizes vehicle, cloud infrastructure, and IoT resources while addressing significant communication security and vehicle-user privacy challenges. To address these issues, we developed an RFID-based authentication protocol for VCC based on a Henon map using a hash function. In addition, we also incorporated a Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) to resist physical tampering attacks. We validate the protocol’s security formally and informally. The formal security analysis is conducted through a widely used RoR model. We use the Scyther simulation tool to verify the proposed protocol’s security against various attacks. Moreover, we compare the performance of our protocol with similar existing protocols across important performance parameters such as communication and computation overheads and security attributes. The proposed protocol yields substantial improvements, demonstrating a 40.74% reduction in computation overhead and a 13.03% decrease in communication overhead as compared to related protocols, delivering both enhanced performance and resource efficiency. The analysis demonstrates its capacity to support secure communication in the VCC environment and satisfy desirable security attributes.

In this paper, we focus on formal analysis of SET Registration protocol and in order to prove it satisfies two security properties, that is, authentication and secrecy, reasonable method Strand Space is used. First, we describe SET Registration protocol in strand space formula and construct their bundles in graph mode. Second, we formalize the goals to be proved. Third, we use minimal element to prove the protocols meet the above secure requirements. It shows that Strand space approach can be used formal analysis on complicated e-commerce protocol visually.

Two-factor authentication is one of the widely used approaches to allow a user to keep a weak password and establish a key shared with a server. Recently, a large number of chaotic maps-based authentication mechanisms have been proposed. However, since the Diffie–Hellman problem of the Chebyshev polynomials defined on the interval [−1,+1] can be solved by Bergamo et al.’s method, most of the secure chaotic maps-based key agreement protocols utilize the enhanced Chebyshev polynomials defined on the interval (−∞,+∞). Thus far, few authenticated key agreement protocols based on chaotic maps have been able to achieve user unlinkability. In this paper, we take the first step in addressing this problem. More specifically, we propose the notions of privacy in authenticated key agreement protocols: anonymity-alone, weak unlinkability, medium unlinkability, and strong unlinkability. Then, we construct two two-factor authentication schemes with medium unlinkability based on Chebyshev polynomials defined on the interval [−1,1] and (−∞,+∞), respectively. We do the formal security analysis of the proposed schemes under the random oracle model. In addition, the proposed protocols satisfy all known security requirements in practical applications. By using Burrows-Abadi-Needham logic (BAN-logic) nonce verification, we demonstrate that the proposed schemes achieve secure authentication. In addition, the detailed comparative security and performance analysis shows that the proposed schemes enable the same functionality but improve the security level.