Formal Methods for Information Security

263-4600-00L (2V + 1U) Autumn Semester 2009

Overview

Lecturers and Tutors: Sebastian Mödersheim and Christoph Sprenger

Lectures: Monday 16-18, IFW B42
Exercises: Tuesday 15-16, IFW B42
Credit: 4 ETCS
Homework: optional, but strongly recommened
Exams: oral exam (session examination)
Language: English

Announcements

• Oct 13: Version 2 of the OFMC binaries is available on the course material page.
  
• The first lecture takes place on Mon, Sep 21. The first exercise session takes place on Tue, Oct 6.
  

Description

The lecture treats formal and cryptographic methods for the modelling and analysis of security-critical systems. The first and main part of the lecture will concentrate on cryptographic protocols. Cryptographic protocols such as SSL/TLS, SSH, Kerberos and IPSec, form the basis for secure communication and business processes. Numerous attacks on published protocols, such as public-key Kerberos, show that the design of these protocols is extremely error-prone. A rigorous analysis of these protocols is therefore indispensable. Besides an overview of existing analysis methods and tools the lecture will convey the theoretical basis and functioning of some selected methods and tools. The tutorials offer the possibility of applying some tools on concrete protocols. The second part of the lecture will be concerned with formal methods in other parts of information security such as access control.

Course Material

The slides of the lecture and the exercise sheets are available on the course material page.

Literature

The lecture is based mainly on various journal/conference papers, but see also:

• Matt Bishop: Computer Security, Pearson Education, 2003.
• Alfred J. Menezes, Paul C. van Oorschot, and Scott A. Vanstone: Handbook of Applied Cryptography, CRC Press, 1996 (available online).
• Colin Boyd and Anish Mathuria, Protocols for Authentication and Key Establishment, Springer, 2003.
  
• Giampaolo Bella, Formal Verification of Security Protocols, Springer, 2007.
• Peter Ryan, Steve Schneider, und M. H. Goldsmith: Modeling and Analysis of Security Protocols, Addision-Wesley, 2000.