Symbolic probabilistic analysis of off-line guessing

Abstract

We introduce a probabilistic framework for the automated analysis of security protocols. Our framework provides a general method for expressing properties of cryptographic primitives, modeling an attacker more powerful than conventional Dolev-Yao attackers. It allows modeling equational properties of cryptographic primitives as well as property statements about their weaknesses, e.g. primitives leaking partial information about messages or the use of weak random generation algorithms. These properties can be used to automatically find attacks and estimate their success probability. Existing symbolic methods can neither model such properties nor find such attacks. We show that the probability estimates we obtain are negligibly different from those yielded by a generalized random oracle model based on sampling terms into bitstrings while respecting the stipulated properties of cryptographic primitives. As case studies, we use a prototype implementation of our framework to model non-trivial properties of RSA encryption and automatically estimate the probability of off-line guessing attacks on the EKE protocol. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.