Timing attacks in security protocols: symbolic framework and proof techniques

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• Vincent Cheval (School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham)
• Thursday 17 April 2014, 11:00-12:00
• Room 245, School of Computer Science.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Vincent Cheval.

We propose a framework for timing attacks, based on (a variant of) the applied-pi calculus. Since many privacy properties, as well as strong secrecy and game-based security properties, are stated as process equivalences, we focus on (time) trace equivalence. We show that actually, considering timing at- tacks does not add any complexity: time trace equivalence can be reduced to length trace equivalence, where the attacker no longer has access to execution times but can still compare the length of messages. We therefore deduce from a previous decidability result for length equivalence that time trace equivalence is decidable for bounded processes and the standard cryptographic primitives. As an application, we study several protocols that aim for privacy. In particular, we (automatically) detect an existing timing attack against the biometric passport and new timing attacks against the Private Authentication protocol.

This talk is part of the Computer Security Seminars series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• Computer Science Departmental Series
• Computer Science Distinguished Seminars
• Computer Security Seminars
• Room 245, School of Computer Science
• computer sience

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