Section: Software
Secure Sessions
Participants : Karthik Bhargavan [ Microsoft Research ] , Ricardo Corin, Cédric Fournet [ Microsoft Research ] , James Leifer, Pierre-Malo Deniélou.
We have designed and implementation of a compiler that, given high-level multiparty session descriptions, generates custom cryptographic protocols.
Our sessions specify pre-arranged patterns of message exchanges and data accesses between distributed participants. They provide each participant with strong security guarantees for all their messages.
Our compiler generates code for sending and receiving these messages, with cryptographic operations and checks, in order to enforce these guarantees against any adversary that may control both the network and some session participants. We furthermore verify that the generated code is secure by relying on a recent type system for cryptography. Most of the proof is performed by mechanized type checking, of the generated code, and does not rely on the correctness of our compiler. We obtain the strongest session security guarantees to date in a model that captures the actual details of protocol code.
Two central design goals guide our work on session implementation. First, all the cryptography required to protect compromised participants is completely hidden from the application programmer, who may reason about the behaviour of a distributed system as if it followed precisely the high level specification. (Thus all cor- respondence properties at the abstract level carry through to any distributed execution.) Second, all low-level network activity is in a one-to-one relationship with high-level communication, thus no additional messages are introduced.
Our compiler translates our session language to custom cryptographic protocols, coded as ML modules (both for F# with .NET cryptographic libraries, and for Ocaml with OpenSSL libraries), which can be linked to application code for each party of the protocol. Our compiler combines a variety of cryptographic techniques and primitives to produce compact message formats and fast processing.
The compiler consists of about 6000 lines of F#. The trusted libraries for networking, cryptographic primitives, and principals shared by all session implementations have 780 lines of code (although their concrete implementation mostly relies on much-larger system libraries).
