Formal Methods for Information Security

Spring Semester 2012 (263-4600-00L)

Overview

Lecturers and Tutors:
Dr. Cas Cremers, Dr. Christoph Sprenger, Dr. Mohammad Torabi Dashti

Lectures:
Thursday 10-12, CAB G 57

Exercises:
Thursday 15-16, CAB G 51

ECTS Credits: 4

Homework:
optional, but strongly recommended

Exams:
oral exam (session examination)

Language:
English

Announcements

  • June 14: The oral exam will take place on Fri, Aug 24 in CNB F 108.
  • The first lecture is on Feb 23. There is no tutorial on that day.

Description

This lecture treats formal and cryptographic methods for the modeling and analysis of security-critical systems. The first and main part of the lecture will concentrate on cryptographic protocols. Cryptographic protocols such as SSL/TLS, SSH, Kerberos and IPSec, form the basis for secure communication and business processes. Numerous attacks on published protocols, such as public-key Kerberos, show that the design of these protocols is extremely error-prone. A rigorous analysis of these protocols is therefore indispensable. Besides an overview of existing analysis methods and tools the lecture will convey the theoretical basis and functioning of some selected methods and tools. The tutorials offer the possibility of applying some tools on concrete protocols. The second part of the lecture focuses on formal methods for modeling and analyzing authorization and access control systems. We will cover the foundations of authorization logics in distributed systems, and study a few notable existing formal logics developed in the past, such as SecPal and DKAL.

Course Material

The slides of the lecture, the exercise sheets, and other resources are available from the course material page (login required).

Literature

The lecture is based mainly on various journal/conference papers, but see also:

  • Matt Bishop: Computer Security, Pearson Education, 2003.
  • Alfred J. Menezes, Paul C. van Oorschot, and Scott A. Vanstone: Handbook of Applied Cryptography, CRC Press, 1996 (available online).
  • Colin Boyd and Anish Mathuria, Protocols for Authentication and Key Establishment, Springer, 2003.
  • Giampaolo Bella, Formal Verification of Security Protocols, Springer, 2007.
  • Peter Ryan, Steve Schneider, und M. H. Goldsmith: Modeling and Analysis of Security Protocols, Addision-Wesley, 2000.
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