Quantitative analysis of a certified e-mail protocol in mobile environments: A probabilistic model checking approach

Abstract

Formal analysis techniques, such as probabilistic model checking, offer an effective mechanism for model-based performance and verification studies of communication systems' behavior that can be abstractly described by a set of rules i.e., a protocol. This article presents an integrated approach for the quantitative analysis of the Certified E-mail Message Delivery (CEMD) protocol that provides security properties to electronic mail services. The proposed scheme employs a probabilistic model checking analysis and provides for the first time insights on the impact of CEMD's error tolerance on computational and transmission cost. It exploits an efficient combination of quantitative analysis and specific computational and communication parameters, i.e., the widely used Texas Instruments TMS320C55x Family operating in an High Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) mobile environment, where multiple CEMD participants execute parallel sessions with high bit error rates (BERs). Furthermore, it offers a tool-assistant approach for the protocol designers and analysts towards the verification of their products under varying parameters. Finally, this analysis can be also utilized towards reliably addressing cost-related issues of certain communication protocols and deciding on their cost-dependent viability, taking into account limitations that are introduced by hardware specifications of mobile devices and noisy mobile environments.

Quantitative model checking of an RSA-based email protocol on mobile devices

“…These results define cost in line with hardware specifications i.e. actual CPU cycles needed for RSA encryption and decryption operations, instead of clear numbers used in the model described in [14]. Thus, the new method constitutes a resource-aware approach towards studying protocols' cost under hardware specifications.…”

“…A primitive model of this idea was firstly proposed by the authors in [14]. This early work employs the Texas Instruments TMS320C55x Family operating at 200M Hz.…”

Advances in Quantitative Verification for Ubiquitous Computing

“…Quantitative verification has previously been applied to analyse dynamic power management schemes for mobile devices [43] and energy harvesters [46]. Here, we highlight a recent case study that applied quantitative verification with PRISM to analyse the computational and transmission cost of an electronic email protocol [4], with the view to provide tool-assisted systematic analysis of the protocol for a variety of mobile environments.…”

“…The Certified E-mail Message Delivery (CEMD) protocol studied in [4] is used on mobile devices such as smartphones and PDAs, including low-cost hardware, frequently operating in noisy environments with high bit error rate. The CEMD protocol provides a number of security features, such as fairness (neither sender nor recipient should gain advantage upon interruption), timeliness (all participants should be able to exit the protocol in a given finite time), and confidentiality (only the intended participant should learn the contents of an email message, implemented using RSA encryption).…”

Secure multicast key protocol for electronic mail systems with providing perfect forward secrecy

“…Because of the popularity, e-mail systems become an adversary's or a malicious user's targets. Among e-mail security issues, basic and primary concerns are e-mails' confidentiality and authentication [1]. Some of data cryptosystems can satisfy these concerns.…”