David A. Basin

The AVISPA tool for the automated validation of internet security protocols and applications

AVISPA is a push-button tool for the automated validation of Internet security-sensitive protocols and applications. It provides a modular and expressive formal language for specifying protocols and their security properties, and integrates different back-ends that implement a variety of state-of-the-art automatic analysis techniques. To the best of our knowledge, no other tool exhibits the same level of scope and robustness while enjoying the same performance and scalability.

SecureUML: A UML-Based Modeling Language for Model-Driven Security

We present a modeling language for the model-driven development of secure, distributed systems based on the Unified Modeling Language (UML). Our approach is based on role-based access control with additional support for specifying authorization constraints. We show how UMLcan be used to specify information related to access control in the overall design of an application and how this information can be used to automatically generate complete access control infrastructures. Our approach can be used to improve productivity during the development of secure distributed systems and the quality of the resulting systems.

OFMC: A symbolic model checker for security protocols

We present the on-the-fly model checker OFMC, a tool that combines two ideas for analyzing security protocols based on lazy, demand-driven search. The first is the use of lazy data types as a simple way of building efficient on-the-fly model checkers for protocols with very large, or even infinite, state spaces. The second is the integration of symbolic techniques and optimizations for modeling a lazy Dolev–Yao intruder whose actions are generated in a demand-driven way. We present both techniques, along with optimizations and proofs of correctness and completeness.Our tool is state of the art in terms of both coverage and performance. For example, it finds all known attacks and discovers a new one in a test suite of 38 protocols from the Clark/Jacob library in a few seconds of CPU time for the entire suite. We also give examples demonstrating how our tool scales to, and finds errors in, large industrial-strength protocols.

An information-theoretic model for adaptive side-channel attacks

We present a model of adaptive side-channel attacks which we combine with information-theoretic metrics to quantify the information revealed to an attacker. This allows us to express an attackers remaining uncertainty about a secret as a function of the number of side-channel measurements made. We present algorithms and approximation techniques for computing this measure. We also give examples of how they can be used to analyze the resistance of hardware implementations of cryptographic functions to both timing and power attacks.

Distributed usage control

Using a server-side architecture to connect specialized enforcement mechanisms with usage control requirements and policies.

Model driven security for process-oriented systems

Model Driven Architecture is an approach to increasing the quality of complex software systems based on creating high-level system models and automatically generating system architectures from the models. We show how this paradigm can be specialized to what we call Model Driven Security. In our specialization, a designer builds a system model along with security requirements, and automatically generates from this a complete, configured security infrastructure.We propose a modular approach to constructing modeling languages supporting this process, which combines languages for modeling system design with languages for modeling security. We present an application to constructing systems from process models, where we combine a UML-based process design language with a security modeling language for formalizing access control requirements. From models in the combined language, we automatically generate security architectures for distributed applications.

An On-the-Fly Model-Checker for Security Protocol Analysis

We introduce the on-the-fly model-checker OFMC, a tool that combines two methods for analyzing security protocols. The first is the use of lazy data-types as a simple way of building an efficient on-the-fly model checker for protocols with infinite state spaces. The second is the integration of symbolic techniques for modeling a Dolev-Yao intruder, whose actions are generated in a demand-driven way. We present experiments that demonstrate that our tool is state-of-the-art, both in terms of coverage and performance, and that it scales well to industrial-strength protocols.

Logic Program Synthesis via Proof Planning

We propose a novel approach to automating the synthesis of logic programs: Logic programs are synthesized as a by-product of the planning of a verification proof. The approach is a two-level one: At the object level, we prove program verification conjectures in a sorted, first-order theory. The conjectures are of the form\( \forall \xrightarrow[{\arg s.}]{}prog(\xrightarrow[{\arg s}]{}) \leftrightarrow spec(\xrightarrow[{\arg s}]{}). \) . At the meta-level, we plan the object-level verification with an unspecified program definition. The definition is represented with a (second-order) meta-level variable, which becomes instantiated in the course of the planning.

A policy language for distributed usage control

We present the Obligation Specification Language (OSL), a policy language for distributed usage control. OSL supports the formalization of a wide range of usage control requirements. We also present translations between OSL and two rights expression languages (RELs) from the DRM area. These translations make it possible to use DRM mechanisms to enforce OSL policies. Furthermore, the translations enhance the interoperability of DRM mechanisms and allow us to apply OSL-specific monitoring and analysis tools to the RELs.

On obligations

Access control is concerned with granting access to sensitive data based on conditions that relate to the past or present, so-called provisions. Expressing requirements from the domain of data protection necessitates extending this notion with conditions that relate to the future. Obligations, in this sense, are concerned with commitments of the involved parties. At the moment of granting access, adherence to these commitments cannot be guaranteed. An example is the requirement “do not re-distribute data”, where the actions of the involved parties may not even be observable. We provide a formal framework that allows us to precisely specify data protection policies. A syntactic classification of formulas gives rise to natural and intuitive formal definitions of provisions and obligations. Based on this classification, we present different mechanisms for checking adherence to agreed upon commitments.