Modeling and Analyzing Security Protocols with Tamarin: A Comprehensive Guide (Information Security and Cryptography) - Hardcover

Basin, David; Cremers, Cas; Dreier, Jannik; Sasse, Ralf

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 3031909356 ISBN 13: 9783031909351

Publisher: Springer, 2025

Synopsis

The Tamarin prover is an open-source analysis tool for cryptographic protocols. Given a specification of a protocol, possible adversaries, and the desired security properties, Tamarin either verifies the protocol or provides counter examples witnessing attacks. Tamarin is a robust and powerful analysis tool: it has been under development for over a decade and has reached a state of maturity where it can be applied to model and analyze a wide range of real-world cryptographic protocols. It is now one of the leading tools in this domain, with a wide and active user community spanning both academia and industry. 

The objective of this book is to help both researchers and practitioners to gain a general understanding of how Formal Methods tools like Tamarin can be used to analyze and improve the quality of real-world protocols. Moreover, we specifically showcase the Tamarin prover and provide guidance on its usage. In this sense, this book provides a user’s manual forTamarin. But it goes far beyond that, highlighting Tamarin’s underlying theory and its use in modeling and applications.

About this title

About the Author

David Basin is a professor in the Department of Computer Science, ETH Zurich since 2003, where he heads the Information Security Group.  His research focuses on Information Security, in particular on foundations, methods, and tools for modeling, building, and validating secure and reliable systems. He is Editor-in-Chief of Springer-Verlag's book series on Information Security and Cryptography and, from 2015 - 2020, of ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security. He is also the founding director of ZISC, the Zurich Information Security Center, which he led from 2003-2011. He is a Fellow of the ACM and of the IEEE.

 

Cas Cremers is a faculty member at the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security in Saarbruecken, Germany, and honorary professor at Saarland University. From 2006 - 2013 he was a postdoctoral researcher, and senior researcher and lecturer, at ETH Zurich. In 2013 he joined the University of Oxford as an Associate Professor, becoming full Professor in 2015. In 2018 he joined CISPA. His work includes co-developing the Scyther and Tamarin tools, and contributing to the TLS and MLS standards of the IETF. His research focuses on formal methods, applied cryptography, and foundations for secure communications.

 

Jannik Dreier is an associate professor at the Université de Lorraine in Nancy, France. He studied computer science at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and ENSIMAG, Grenoble, and completed a PhD in computer science at the University Grenoble Alpes in 2013. He then was a postdoctoral researcher at ETH Zurich until 2015. Since 2021, he has been co-chairing the working group on formal methods for security of the CNRS research network on IT security. His research focuses on the design and analysis of cryptographic protocols, for example for electronic voting, using rigorous methods and automated tools.

 

Ralf Sasse is a senior scientist and lecturer at the Department of Computer Science at ETH Zurich. He received his M.Sc. degree in computer science from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in 2005, and his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2012. His research focuses on the theory and practice of cryptographic security protocol verification, and particularly on developing tools that assist in this task. Recent work applied this to 5G mobile communication and EMV payment card security.

From the Back Cover

Work on the Tamarin tool started in 2010, with the goal of building a powerful model checker for security protocols that could handle features beyond the state-of-the-art.  Tamarin has since grown from a prototype verification system into a large, successful, open-source project, with contributors and users across many countries. The tool has proven to be robust and effective, and has reached a state of maturity where it has been applied to model and analyze a wide range of large-scale, state-of-the-art, cryptographic protocols.  Examples include TLS 1.3, 5G AKA, EMV (Chip and Pin, contactless), and Apple’s iMessage PQ3. Tamarin is now one of the leading cryptographic protocol verification tools, with an active user community spanning both academia and industry. 

 

This unique book provides a detailed account of how Tamarin can be used to solve practical problems in modeling and reasoning about cryptographic protocols.  This includes:

• Background and motivation on Formal Methods for security

• Basic protocol modeling

• Using the tool and common workflows

• Advanced modeling of primitives

• Formalizing trace properties and observational equivalence properties

• Automation support

• Case studies

It is illustrated with many figures and diagrams, allowing easy access to the concepts and use cases.

 

This book is written by four of Tamarin’s authors, each with extensive experience in security and formal methods.  The book is practically oriented and is aimed at security researchers and engineers who work with cryptographic protocols and wish to learn how to rigorously specify and analyze them. This includes information security students learning about cryptographic protocols, industrial practitioners who design their own proprietary protocols, engineers involved in protocol standardization and related activities, as well as teams that evaluate protocol designs. The book is written with this diverse audience in mind, keeping the prerequisites to a minimum.

Edition details

• Publisher: Springer
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 3031909356
• ISBN 13: 9783031909351
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 339