Protocol, mobility and adversary models for the verification of security

The increasing heterogeneity of communicating devices, ranging from resource constrained battery driven sensor nodes to multi-core processor computers, challenges protocol design. We examine security and privacy protocols with respect to exterior factors such as users, adversaries, and computing and communication resources; and also interior factors such as the operations, the interactions and the parameters of a protocol. Users and adversaries interact with security and privacy protocols, and even affect the outcome of the protocols. We propose user mobility and adversary models to examine how the location privacy of users is affected when they move relative to each other in specific patterns while adversaries with varying strengths try to identify the users based on their historical locations. The location privacy of the users are simulated with the support of the K-Anonymity protection mechanism, the Distortion-based metric, and our models of users' mobility patterns and adversaries' knowledge about users. Security and privacy protocols need to operate on various computing and communication resources. Some of these protocols can be adjusted for different situations by changing parameters. A common example is to use longer secret keys in encryption for stronger security. We experiment with the trade-off between the security and the performance of the Fiat–Shamir identification protocol. We pipeline the protocol to increase its utilisation as the communication delay outweighs the computation. A mathematical specification based on a formal method leads to a strong proof of security. We use three formal languages with their tool supports in order to model and verify the Secure Hierarchical In-Network Aggregation (SHIA) protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). The three formal languages specialise on cryptographic operations, distributed systems and mobile processes. Finding an appropriate level of abstraction to represent the essential features of the protocol in three formal languages was central.QC 20170217ProFu