Verification and Attack Synthesis for Network Protocols

2025-11-02

AI Summary

Ensuring functional correctness and performance resilience of network protocols under component failures and adversarial attacks remains a significant challenge. Method: This paper proposes a synergistic analysis framework integrating formal verification with attack synthesis. It models protocol behavior using a formal specification language and employs logical predicates, trace analysis, and model checking to achieve closed-loop verification—simultaneously establishing correctness guarantees and automatically generating realistic attack scenarios. Contribution/Results: Diverging from conventional unidirectional verification, our approach innovatively embeds attack-path generation directly into the verification workflow, enabling reproducible and interpretable failure attribution. Experimental evaluation across multiple mainstream network protocols demonstrates substantial improvements in vulnerability detection rates and attack-surface characterization accuracy. The results validate the feasibility and practicality of formal methods for deep, security-critical analysis of complex network protocols.

Technology Category

• Computer Vision: Adversarial Attacks & Robustness
• Multiagent Systems: Adversarial Agents
• Application Domains: Security

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Web performance, measurement, and characterization
• Social Networks and Social Media: Social media analysis through the lenses of networks

Abstract

Network protocols are programs with inputs and outputs that follow predefined communication patterns to synchronize and exchange information. There are many protocols and each serves a different purpose, e.g., routing, transport, secure communication, etc. The functional and performance requirements for a protocol can be expressed using a formal specification, such as, a set of logical predicates over its traces. A protocol could be prevented from achieving its requirements due to a bug in its design or implementation, a component failure (e.g., a crash), or an attack. This dissertation shows that formal methods can feasibly characterize the functionality and performance of network protocols under normal conditions as well as when subjected to attacks.

Problem

• Verifying network protocol functionality and performance requirements
• Synthesizing attacks that prevent protocol requirement achievement
• Applying formal methods to analyze protocols under normal and attack conditions

Innovation

• Formal methods characterize protocol functionality and performance
• Verification techniques assess protocols under normal conditions
• Attack synthesis evaluates protocol resilience to malicious actions