Adversary Safety by Construction in a Language of Cryptographic Protocols

Timothy Braje, Alice Lee, Andrew Wagner, Benjamin Kaiser, Daniel Park, Martine Kalke, Robert Cunningham, Adam Chlipala. Adversary Safety by Construction in a Language of Cryptographic Protocols. Proceedings of the 35th IEEE Computer Security Foundations Symposium (CSF'22). August 2022. Lincoln Laboratory Best Paper Award.

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Compared to ordinary concurrent and distributed systems, cryptographic protocols are distinguished by the need to reason about interference by adversaries. We suggest a new layered approach to tame that complexity, via an executable protocol language whose semantics does not reveal an adversary directly, instead enforcing a set of intuitive hygiene rules. By virtue of those rules, protocols written in this language provably behave identically with or without interference by active Dolev-Yao-style adversaries. As a result, formal reasoning about protocols can be simplified enough that even naive model checking can establish correctness of a multiparty protocol, through analysis of a state space with no adversary.

We present the design and implementation of SPICY, short for Secure Protocols Implemented CorrectlY, including the semantics of its input languages; the essential safety proofs, formalized in the Coq theorem prover; and the automation techniques. We provide a preliminary evaluation of the tool's performance and capabilities via a handful of case studies.

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