A Hybrid Analysis for Security Protocols with State

ABSTRACT. Cryptographic protocols rely on message-passing to coordinate activity among principals. Each principal maintains local state in individual local sessions only as needed to complete that session. However, in some protocols a principal also uses state to coordinate its different local sessions. Sometimes the non-local, mutable state is used as a means, for example with smart cards or Trusted Platform Modules. Sometimes it is the purpose of running the protocol, for example in commercial transactions.

Many richly developed tools and techniques, based on well-understood foundations, are available for design and analysis of pure message-passing protocols. But the presence of cross-session state poses difficulties for these techniques.

In this paper we provide a framework for modeling stateful protocols. We define a hybrid analysis method. It leverages theorem-proving -- in this instance, the PVS prover -- for reasoning about computations over state. It combines that with an "enrich-by-need" approach -- embodied by CPSA -- that focuses on the message-passing part. As a case study we give a full analysis of the Envelope Protocol, due to Mark Ryan.