A formal methodology for integral security design and verification of network protocols
This work addresses security verification for network protocol designers, offering a structured approach to avoid resource waste, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing formal methods without introducing a new paradigm.
The authors tackled the problem of verifying security properties in network protocols by proposing a formal methodology that separates context and requirements analysis from formal representation and procedural verification, resulting in an iterative process that efficiently detects flaws proportional to attack complexity, as demonstrated through analysis of three real protocols.
We propose a methodology for verifying security properties of network protocols at design level. It can be separated in two main parts: context and requirements analysis and informal verification; and formal representation and procedural verification. It is an iterative process where the early steps are simpler than the last ones. Therefore, the effort required for detecting flaws is proportional to the complexity of the associated attack. Thus, we avoid wasting valuable resources for simple flaws that can be detected early in the verification process. In order to illustrate the advantages provided by our methodology, we also analyze three real protocols.