Application of Verification Techniques to Security

Abstract

In this chapter, the authors give a short overview of the state of the art of formal verification techniques to the engineering of safe and secure systems. The main focus is on the support of security of real-world systems with mechanized verification techniques, in particular model checking. Based on prior experience with safety analysis—in particular the TWIN elevator (ThyssenKrupp) case study—the current case study ventures into the rising field of social engineering attacks on security. This main focus and original contribution of this chapter considers the security analysis of an insider attack illustrating the benefits of model checking with belief logics and actor system modeling.

Invalidating Policies using Structural Information

“…We specify the goal as the negated policy, and then let the model checker find its way to a state that violates the policy. In a preliminary study [9] we have shown how this can be done for the current example (see Appendix for the MCMAS specification). To cut a long story short, we assume a secret file of user U .…”

“…Appendix VII-1 show the MCMAS specification for the user, and VII-2 the specification for the janitor from [9] mentioned in Section III. Appendix VII-3, finally, contains the Isabelle-experiment we conducted to support our argument about workflow policy invalidation and refinement.…”