%0 Journal Article
%T Formal Analysis of SET and NSL Protocols Using the Interpretation Functions-Based Method
%A Hanane Houmani
%A Mohamed Mejri
%J Journal of Computer Networks and Communications
%D 2012
%I Hindawi Publishing Corporation
%R 10.1155/2012/254942
%X Most applications in the Internet such as e-banking and e-commerce use the SET and the NSL protocols to protect the communication channel between the client and the server. Then, it is crucial to ensure that these protocols respect some security properties such as confidentiality, authentication, and integrity. In this paper, we analyze the SET and the NSL protocols with respect to the confidentiality (secrecy) property. To perform this analysis, we use the interpretation functions-based method. The main idea behind the interpretation functions-based technique is to give sufficient conditions that allow to guarantee that a cryptographic protocol respects the secrecy property. The flexibility of the proposed conditions allows the verification of daily-life protocols such as SET and NSL. Also, this method could be used under different assumptions such as a variety of intruder abilities including algebraic properties of cryptographic primitives. The NSL protocol, for instance, is analyzed with and without the homomorphism property. We show also, using the SET protocol, the usefulness of this approach to correct weaknesses and problems discovered during the analysis. 1. Motivations and Background Intuitively, cryptographic protocols are communication protocols that involve cryptography to reach some specific security goals (authentication, secrecy, etc.). Today, these protocols are playing a key role in our daily life. Among others, they protect our banking transactions (e-commerce protocol), our access to private wired and wireless network, and our access to a variety of indispensable services (web, FTP, e-mail, etc.). Obviously, any flaws in such protocols can have heavy negative consequences on individuals and organizations. It is also a well-known fact that attacks exploiting cryptographic protocols flaws are generally very difficult to detect: tools such as intrusion detections and firewalls are helpless against them since it is difficult (even impossible some-times) to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate users when the cryptographic protocol is flawed. Like any sensitive system, cryptographic protocols need to be seriously studied and their correctness should be rigorously analyzed and ideally proved. For that reason, formal specification and verification of security protocols have received much attention in recent years. Some of these works including comparative studies could be found in [1¨C10]. Today and after more of thirty years of hard work, international community has a better understanding of cryptographic protocols and better
%U http://www.hindawi.com/journals/jcnc/2012/254942/