Paper detail

Verifying Cryptographic Security Implementations in C Using Automated Model Extraction

This thesis presents an automated method for verifying security properties of protocol implementations written in the C language. We assume that each successful run of a protocol follows the same path through the C code, justified by the fact that typical security protocols have linear structure. We then perform symbolic execution of that path to extract a model expressed in a process calculus similar to the one used by the CryptoVerif tool. The symbolic execution uses a novel algorithm that allows symbolic variables to represent bitstrings of potentially unknown length to model incoming protocol messages. The extracted models do not use pointer-addressed memory, but they may still contain low-level details concerning message formats. In the next step we replace the message formatting expressions by abstract tupling and projection operators. The properties of these operators, such as the projection operation being the inverse of the tupling operation, are typically only satisfied with respect to inputs of correct types. Therefore we typecheck the model to ensure that all type-safety constraints are satisfied. The resulting model can then be verified with CryptoVerif to obtain a computational security result directly, or with ProVerif, to obtain a computational security result by invoking a computational soundness theorem. Our method achieves high automation and does not require user input beyond what is necessary to specify the properties of the cryptographic primitives and the desired security goals. We evaluated the method on several protocol implementations, totalling over 3000 lines of code. The biggest case study was a 1000-line implementation that was independently written without verification in mind. We found several flaws that were acknowledged and fixed by the authors, and were able to verify the fixed code without any further modifications to it.