Modelling Agent-Skipping Attacks in Message Forwarding Protocols
This addresses security vulnerabilities in protocols like TLS middleboxes for users and developers, but it is incremental as it builds on existing symbolic models.
The paper tackled the problem of agent-skipping attacks in message forwarding protocols, where attackers bypass intermediaries to violate security, and introduced a framework using multiset rewriting to analyze path integrity, identifying key attacks in modern protocols.
Message forwarding protocols are protocols in which a chain of agents handles transmission of a message. Each agent forwards the received message to the next agent in the chain. For example, TLS middleboxes act as intermediary agents in TLS, adding functionality such as filtering or compressing data. In such protocols, an attacker may attempt to bypass one or more intermediary agents. Such an agent-skipping attack can the violate security requirements of the protocol. Using the multiset rewriting model in the symbolic setting, we construct a comprehensive framework of such path protocols. In particular, we introduce a set of security goals related to path integrity: the notion that a message faithfully travels through participants in the order intended by the initiating agent. We perform a security analysis of several such protocols, highlighting key attacks on modern protocols.