Secure refinements of communication channels

Vincent Cheval (1, 2) , Véronique Cortier (2) , Eric Le Morvan (2)

1 University of Kent [Canterbury]
2 CASSIS - Combination of approaches to the security of infinite states systems

It is a common practice to design a protocol (say Q) assuming some secure channels. Then the secure channels are implemented using any standard protocol, e.g. TLS. In this paper, we study when such a practice is indeed secure. We provide a characterization of both confidential and authenticated channels. As an application, we study several protocols of the literature including TLS and BAC protocols. Thanks to our result, we can consider a larger number of sessions when analyzing complex protocols resulting from explicit implementation of the secure channels of some more abstract protocol Q.

Keywords: Implementation; Channels; Formal methods; Composition; Protocol

Domains: Computer Science [cs]; Cryptography and Security [cs.CR]

Vincent Cheval, Véronique Cortier, Eric Le Morvan. Secure refinements of communication channels. FSTTCS 2015, Dec 2015, Bangalore, India. ⟨hal-01238094⟩