Reasoning about Physical properties Of security Protocols with an Application To contactless Systems

Objective

The shrinking size of microprocessors as well as the ubiquity of wireless communication have led to the proliferation of portable computing devices with novel security requirements. Whereas traditional security protocols achieve their security goals relying solely on cryptographic primitives like encryptions and hash functions, the
protocols employed to secure these devices establish and rely in addition on properties of the physical world.
For instance, they may use, as basic building blocks, protocols for ensuring physical proximity, secure
localisation, or secure neighbourhood discovery.

Unfortunately, we often hear about ill-conceived systems, and portable computing devices raise some serious concerns about privacy.To draw meaningful conclusions, the security analysis of these systems has to be done taking into account physical properties, such as transmission delay, network topology, and node positions. This contrasts sharply with
standard models used to analyse traditional protocols.

The main objective of the POPSTAR project is to develop foundations and practical tools to analyse modern security
protocols that establish and rely on physical properties. In particular, we will:
- devise models and develop techniques to make possible a rigorous analysis of cryptographic protocols that establish and
rely on physical properties;
- develop foundations and practical tools for formally verifying security properties, as well as privacy properties that play
a prominent role is many applications;
- experiment the developed techniques for analysing the security of modern contactless systems.

The POPSTAR project will significantly advance the use of formal verification to contribute to the security analysis of protocols that rely on physical properties. This project is bold and ambitious, and answers the forthcoming expectation from consumers and citizens for high level of trust and confidence about contactless nomadic devices.

Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)

CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.

• engineering and technology electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering electronic engineering computer hardware computer processors
• natural sciences physical sciences theoretical physics particle physics
• natural sciences mathematics pure mathematics topology
• natural sciences computer and information sciences computer security cryptography
• engineering and technology electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering information engineering telecommunications telecommunications networks

Keywords

Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)

• formal methods
• symbolic models
• verification
• cryptographic protocols

Host institution

Beneficiaries (1)