Shahabuddin Muhammad

Discovering Man-in-the-Middle Attacks in Authentication Protocols

Security protocols are widely used to provide secure communication in many critical applications such as e-commerce and defense. Numerous formal methods have been used to ensure the desired working of security protocols. Formal methods provide rigorous analysis but are complex, whereas informal method are simple but lack the power to express the details of the analysis. Strand-space framework has become a popular formal method for analyzing security protocols due to its graph-theoretic nature. Benefiting from the expressiveness of this method and utilizing the intuitiveness of informal logical arguments, we propose a simplified generic approach based on a challenge-response criterion to discover man-in-the-middle attacks in authentication protocols. Man-in-the-middle attacks result in discrepancies in the parameters among the participants of a protocol. To discover the possibility of man-in-the-middle attack on a protocol, we propose that each participant investigate the parameters of the other participants of the protocol by finding out the true originator of its received messages. With the help of an example, we demonstrate how the inability in finding out the true originator of a message guides us through a sequence of logical arguments eventually leading to a successful man-in-the-middle attack.

Understanding the intruder through attacks on cryptographic protocols

The vulnerability and importance of computers, robots, internet etc, demand the employment of exceedingly reliable methods in the design of secure systems. Security protocols are one of the most important design parameters. History has proven security protocols to be vulnerable even after they enjoyed circumspect design and meticulous review by experts. We posit that understanding the subtle issues in security protocols is important when designing a protocol. In particular, understanding a penetrator and the knowledge of different attack strategies that a penetrator can apply are among the most important issues that affect the design of security protocols. We describe the notion of a penetrator and specify his characteristics. Our purpose is to emphasize the design criteria of an authentication protocol through the use of some nice and subtle attacks that existed in the literature in the field of the design of security protocols.

Formal Verification of 802.11i using Strand Space Formalism

Despite an appealing desire to shift from wired to wireless domain and substantial deployment of wireless applications, wireless security is still a stumbling block. As a remedy, IEEE has designed a new protocol, 802.11i, for wireless local area networks addressing security issues. Formal analysis is important to ensure that protocols work properly without having to resort to tedious testing and debugging which can only show the presence of errors, never their absence. We analyze the protocol model for 802.11i in a formal setting. We translate the 802.11i protocol into Strand Space Model for protocol verification. We prove the authentication property of the resulting model using the Strand Space formalism. The intruder is imbued with powerful capabilities and repercussion to possible attacks are evaluated. Our analysis proves that authentication is not compromised in the presented model.

A logic-based verification framework for authentication protocols

Designing authentication protocols is an error-prone process. In this paper, we develop a deductive style proof-based framework to verify authentication protocols. The proposed framework clearly represents authentication protocols and concisely proves their security properties. We utilise Distributed Temporal Protocol Logic (DTPL) to capture temporal aspects of distributed events. We formalise essential features for achieving authentication. We also extend the notion of source association for public-key protocols. The resulting framework demonstrates the ease with which a protocol is analysed. It also demonstrates DTPLs suitability to be used as a meta-level tool to benefit from different formalisms.

Wireless sensor network security: a secure sink node architecture

Sensor network comprises of scattered sensor nodes with limited computational capabilities and battery power. The existing security solutions for traditional wireless networks can not be used because of the constraints associated with sensor network. We present secure sink node architecture as two-tiered scheme for sensor network security. The architecture protects the sink node from unauthorized access by surrounding it with two protection layers. Sink nodes listen to only inner layer nodes and inner nodes are allowed to communicate with only outer layer nodes. These protection layers are formed in an intelligent manner without violating constraints specific to sensor network. In order to enhance security, protection layers are re-adjusted in case of an attack. We present statistical analysis to elucidate the performance of proposed architecture.

Priority based channel assignment with pair-wise listen and sleep scheduling for wireless sensor networks

Plethora of anticipated applications and ease of deployment have influenced researchers and disseminated the importance of sensor networks in the research community. Energy (battery-power) is an important and meager resource in sensor networks. We attempt to conserve energy in the sensor network and posit a priority based channel assignment with pair-wise listen and sleep scheduling scheme. The scheme uses distinct channels in one-hop neighborhood of a node. In case of non-availability of any new channel, we intelligently reuse the existing channels to guarantee that the node with minimum energy in one-hop neighborhood has more chance of getting a dedicated channel. We also incorporate periodic listen and sleep methodology in a pair-wise fashion to conserve battery-power of each node. Simulation results show that the proposed strategy fends to conserve reasonable amount of battery power and avoids collisions.

Designing Authentication Protocols: Trends and Issues

The vulnerability and importance of computers, robots, internet etc, demand the employment of exceedingly reliable methods in the design of secure systems. Security protocols are one of the most important design parameters. History has proven security protocols to be vulnerable even after they enjoyed circumspect design and meticulous review by experts. Plethora of formal systems exist in order to verify a security protocol. We posit that understanding the subtle issues in security protocols is important when designing a formal framework. In particular, we discuss authentication protocols. We mention their characteristics and point out important design features that a security protocol designer should focus in the design process. We also describe the notion of a penetrator and specify his characteristics. Our purpose is to emphasize the design criteria of an authentication protocol, clarify some subtleties, and give suggestions and pointers that may become helpful in the field of design and verification of cryptographic protocols.

A Multi-agent Approach Toward the Security Analysis of the 802.11i Handshake Protocol

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) are now increasingly deployed because of their low up-front cost, easy network maintenance, robustness, and reliable self coverage. It is important to guarantee the security properties of the WMN to ensure a desired secure system. In this paper, we formally verify the authentication of a WMN. We start with translating a WMN into a multi-agent system (MAS), where each node represents an agent of the MAS. The purpose is to benefit from the existing state-of-the-art verification techniques applicable in the multi-agent domain. We then prove the authentication property of the WMN. Our contributions include: translating a wireless mesh network into a formal multi-agent framework, representing the authentication property as MASs formal specification, and applying the strand system verification strategy to prove the correctness of MASs authentication

Logic-Based Formal Analysis of Cryptographic Protocols

We develop informal principals and formal rules to verify security properties in cryptographic protocols. These principals are based on the notions of message origination, message freshness, ideal cryptography, message count, and etcetera. Our focus is the authentication and the secrecy properties. We offer a different perspective for analysis in which participants try to achieve guarantees from their own run of the protocol by investigating the set of messages they send and receive instead of by looking at several attack strategies of an illegitimate participant We provide a computational model and present formal semantics of our proposed logical framework according to which our formulas are sound

A Parameterized Analysis of Public-Key Protocols: Needham-Schroeder and Kerberos-5

The need for providing assurance in parameter matching in authentication protocols is emphasized by analyzing well-known Needham-Schroeder public-key protocol as well as the public-key extension of widely deployed network authentication protocol Kerberos-5. Authentication protocols achieve their goals when a participant guarantees its set of parameters to be in accordance with that of the rest of the participants of the protocol. On the other hand, the lack of guarantee suggests possible venues for attacks by a saboteur. The above mentioned protocols exhibit this lack of assurance in parameter matching among participants and hence are succumbed to subtle attacks presented in this paper. We further elaborate the commonalities in the vulnerability of both the protocols