2010/03/28 by Sreekanth Malladi, Malladi, Sreekanth, Pascal Lafourcade +1
Computer Science · #Advanced Authentication Protocols Security #Cryptography and Data Security #Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #User Authentication and Security Systems #cs.CR
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1003.5385
16 pages, Appeared in proceedings of Security with Rewriting Techniques (SecRet09), Affiliated to CSF Symposium 2009, Port Jefferson, NY.
arxiv created 2010/03/28 · openalex publication_date 2010/03/28 · arxiv updated 2010/03/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Type-flaw attacks upon security protocols wherein agents are led to misinterpret message types have been reported frequently in the literature. Preventing them is crucial for protocol security and verification. Heather et al. proved that tagging every message field with it's type prevents all type-flaw attacks under a free message algebra and perfect encryption system. In this paper, we prove that type-flaw attacks can be prevented with the same technique even under the ACUN algebraic properties of XOR which is commonly used in "real-world" protocols such as SSL 3.0. Our proof method is general and can be easily extended to other monoidal operators that possess properties such as Inverse and Idempotence as well. We also discuss how tagging could be used to prevent type-flaw attacks under other properties such as associativity of pairing, commutative encryption, prefix property and homomorphic encryption.