Automating Cryptographic Protocol Language Generation from Structured Specifications
This work addresses the problem for cryptographers by providing an automated tool to streamline protocol modeling, though it is incremental as it builds on prior data-centric approaches.
The paper tackles the challenge of automating the generation of cryptographic protocol models from structured specifications, resulting in a tool that exports to ProVerif and C++ implementations while extending verification plugins.
Security of cryptographic protocols can be analysed by creating a model in a formal language and verifying the model in a tool. All such tools focus on the last part of the analysis, verification, and the interpretation of the specification is only explained in papers. Rather, we focus on the interpretation and modelling part by presenting a tool to aid the cryptographer throughout the process and automatically generating code in a target language. We adopt a data-centric approach where the protocol design is stored in a structured way rather than as textual specifications. Previous work shows how this approach facilitates the interpretation to a single language (for Tamarin) which required aftermath modifications. By improving the expressiveness of the specification data structure we extend the tool to export to an additional formal language, ProVerif, as well as a C++ fully running implementation. Furthermore, we extend the plugins to verify correctness in ProVerif and executability lemmas in Tamarin. In this paper we model the Diffie-Hellman key exchange, which is traditionally used as a case study; a demo is also provided for other commonly studied protocols, Needham- Schroeder and Needham-Schroeder-Lowe.