At the end of last week, Microsoft Research hosted a meeting of “Cryptoforma”, a proposed new project (a so-called “network of excellence”) to bring together researchers working on applying formal methods to security. They don’t yet know whether or not this project will get funding from the EPSRC, but I wish them good luck.

There were several very interesting papers presented at the meeting, but today I want to talk about the one by Liqun Chen, “Parsing ambiguities in authentication and key establishment protocols”.

Some of the protocol specifications published by ISO specify how the protocol should be encoded on the wire, in sufficient detail to enable different implementations to interoperate. An example of a standard of this type is the one for the public key certificates that are used in SSL authentication of web sites (and many other applications).

The security standards produced by one group within ISO (SC27) aren’t like that. They specify the abstract protocols, but give the implementor considerable leeway in how they are encoded. This means that you can have different implementations that don’t interoperate. If these implementations are in different application domains, the lack of interoperability doesn’t matter. For example, Tuomas Aura and I recently wrote a paper in which we presented a protocol for privacy-preserving wireless LAN authentication, which we rather boldly claim to be based on the abstract protocol from ISO 9798-4.

You could think of these standards as separating concerns: the SC27 folks get the abstract crypto protocol correct, and then someone else standardises how to encode it in a particular application. But does the choice of concrete encoding affect the protocol’s correctness?

Liqun Chen points out one case where it clearly does. In the abstract protocols in ISO 9798-4 and others, data fields are joined by a double vertical bar operator. If you want to find out what that double vertical bar really means, you have to spend another 66 Swiss Francs and get a copy of ISO 9798-1, which tells you that Y || Z means “the result of the concatenation of the data items Y and Z in that order”.

Oops.

When we specify abstract protocols, it’s generally understood that the concrete encoding that gets signed or MAC’d contains enough information to unambigously identify the field boundaries: it contains length fields, a closing XML tag, or whatever. A signed message {Payee, Amount} K_A should not allow a payment of $3 to Bob12 to be mutated by the attacker into a payment of $23 to Bob1. But ISO 9798 (and a bunch of others) don’t say that. There’s nothing that says a conforming implementation can’t send the length field without authentication.

No of course, an implementor probably wouldn’t do that. But they might.

More generally: do these abstract protocols make a bunch of implicit, undocumented assumptions about the underlying crypto primitives and encodings that might turn out not to be true?

See also: Boyd, C. Hidden assumptions in cryptographic protocols. Computers and Digital Techniques, volume 137, issue 6, November 1990.