Departmental Papers (CIS)

Date of this Version

June 2007

Document Type

Conference Paper

Comments

Copyright 2007 IEEE. Reprinted from Proceedings of the 20th IEEE Computer Security Foundations Symposium, CSF '07, pages 64-78.

This material is posted here with permission of the IEEE. Such permission of the IEEE does not in any way imply IEEE endorsement of any of the University of Pennsylvania's products or services. Internal or personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution must be obtained from the IEEE by writing to pubs-permissions@ieee.org. By choosing to view this document, you agree to all provisions of the copyright laws protecting it.

Abstract

There has been excellent progress on languages for rigorously describing key exchange protocols and techniques for proving that the network security tunnels they establish preserve confidentiality and integrity. New problems arise in describing and analyzing establishment protocols and tunnels when they are used as building blocks to achieve high-level security goals for network administrative domains. We introduce a language called the tunnel calculus and associated analysis techniques that can address functional problems arising in the concurrent establishment of tunnels. In particular, we use the tunnel calculus to explain and resolve cases where interleavings of establishment messages can lead to deadlock. Deadlock can be avoided by making unwelcome security compromises, but we prove that it can be eliminated systematically without such compromises using a concept of session to relate tunnels. Our main results are noninterference and progress theorems familiar to the concurrency community, but not previously applied to tunnel establishment protocols.

Download

Share

COinS
 

Date Posted: 27 November 2007

This document has been peer reviewed.