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International Workshop on Security and Trust Management

STM 2020: Security and Trust Management pp 3–21Cite as

Modelling of 802.11 4-Way Handshake Attacks and Analysis of Security Properties

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Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNSC,volume 12386)

Abstract

The IEEE 802.11 standard defines a 4-way handshake between a supplicant and an authenticator for secure communication. Many attacks such as KRACK, cipher downgrades, and key recovery attacks have been recently discovered against it. These attacks raise the question as to whether the implementation violates one of the required security properties or whether the security properties are insufficient. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that shows how to answer this question using formal methods. We model and analyse a variety of these attacks using the Tamarin prover against the security properties mandated by the standard for the 4-way handshake. This lets us see which security properties are violated. We find that our Tamarin models vulnerable to the KRACK attacks do not violate any of the standard’s security properties, indicating that the properties, as specified by the standard, are insufficient. We propose an additional security property and show that it is violated by systems vulnerable to KRACK attacks, and that enforcing this property is successful in stopping them. We demonstrate how to use Tamarin to automatically test the adequacy of a set of security properties against attacks, and that the suggested mitigations make 802.11 secure against these attacks.

Keywords

  • IEEE 802.11
  • WPA2
  • 4-way handshake
  • Group key handshake
  • KRACK attack
  • Downgrade attack
  • Tamarin prover
  • SAPiC

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  • DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-59817-4_1
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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Robert Künnemann, Chris McMahon Stone and Mathy Vanhoef for useful discussions. We would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions. This work was partially supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 779391 (FutureTPM).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK

    Rajiv Ranjan Singh, José Moreira, Tom Chothia & Mark D. Ryan

  2. Department of Computer Science, Shyam Lal College (Eve.), University of Delhi, Delhi, India

    Rajiv Ranjan Singh

Authors
  1. Rajiv Ranjan Singh
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  2. José Moreira
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  3. Tom Chothia
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  4. Mark D. Ryan
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Rajiv Ranjan Singh .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, UK

    Dr. Kostantinos Markantonakis

  2. National Research Council, Pisa, Italy

    Marinella Petrocchi

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Singh, R.R., Moreira, J., Chothia, T., Ryan, M.D. (2020). Modelling of 802.11 4-Way Handshake Attacks and Analysis of Security Properties. In: Markantonakis, K., Petrocchi, M. (eds) Security and Trust Management. STM 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12386. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59817-4_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59817-4_1

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