Securing Statically-verified Communications Protocols Against Timing Attacks

Abstract

We present a federated analysis of communication protocols which considers both security properties and timing. These are not entirely independent observations of a protocol; by using timing observations of an executing protocol it is possible to calculate encryption keys which were intended to be secret or to deduce derived information about the nature of the communication even in the presence of unbreakable encryption. Our analysis is based on expressing the protocol as a high-level model and deriving from this process calculus models analysable by the Imperial PEPA Compiler and the LySatool.