A New Method to Analyze the Security of Protocol Implementations Based on Ideal Trace

Abstract

The security analysis of protocols on theory level cannot guarantee the security of protocol implementations. To solve this problem, researchers have done a lot, and many achievements have been reached in this field, such as model extraction and code generation. However, the existing methods do not take the security of protocol implementations into account. In this paper, we have proposed to exploit the traces of function return values to analyze the security of protocol implementations at the source code level. Taking classic protocols into consideration, for example (like the Needham-Schroeder protocol and the Diffie-Hellman protocol, which cannot resist man-in-the-middle attacks), we have analyzed man-in-the-middle attacks during the protocol implementations and have carried out experiments. It has been shown in the experiments that our new method works well. Different from other methods of analyzing the security of protocol implementations in the literatures, our new method can avoid some flaws of program languages (like C language memory access, pointer analysis, etc.) and dynamically analyze the security of protocol implementations.