### Computational Soundness without Protocol Restrictions

Michael Backes, Ankit Malik, and Dominique Unruh

##### Abstract

The abstraction of cryptographic operations by term algebras, called Dolev-Yao models, is essential in almost all tool-supported methods for verifying security protocols. Recently significant progress was made in establishing computational soundness results: these results prove that Dolev-Yao style models can be sound with respect to actual cryptographic realizations and security definitions. However, these results came at the cost of imposing various constraints on the set of permitted security protocols: e.g., dishonestly generated keys must not be used, key cycles need to be avoided, and many more. In a nutshell, the cryptographic security definitions did not adequately capture these cases, but were considered carved in stone; in contrast, the symbolic abstractions were bent to reflect cryptographic features and idiosyncrasies, thereby requiring adaptations of existing verification tools. In this paper, we pursue the opposite direction: we consider a symbolic abstraction for public-key encryption and identify two cryptographic definitions called PROG-KDM (programmable key-dependent message) security and MKE (malicious-key extractable) security that we jointly prove to be sufficient for obtaining computational soundness without imposing assumptions on the protocols using this abstraction. In particular, dishonestly generated keys obtained from the adversary can be sent, received, and used. The definitions can be met by existing cryptographic schemes in the random oracle model. This yields the first computational soundness result for trace-properties that holds for arbitrary protocols using this abstraction (in particular permitting to send and receive dishonestly generated keys), and that is accessible to all existing tools for reasoning about Dolev-Yao models without further adaptations.

Available format(s)
Category
Foundations
Publication info
Published elsewhere. A short version appears at ACM CCS 2012
Keywords
protocol verificationcomputational soundness
Contact author(s)
unruh @ ut ee
History
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2012/486

CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2012/486,
author = {Michael Backes and Ankit Malik and Dominique Unruh},
title = {Computational Soundness without Protocol Restrictions},
howpublished = {Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2012/486},
year = {2012},
note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2012/486}},
url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2012/486}
}

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