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Scenarios and covert channels: another game…. (English) Zbl 1272.68058

de Alfaro, L. (ed.), Proceedings of the workshop on games in design and verification (GDV 2004), Boston, MA, USA, June 18, 2004. Amsterdam: Elsevier. Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science 119, No. 1, 93-116 (2005).
Summary: Covert channels are information leaks in systems that use resources to transfer secretly a message. They are a threat for security, performance, but also for a system’s profitability. This paper proposes a new approach to detect covert channels from scenario models of protocols. The problem of finding covert channels in scenarios is first modeled as a game, in which a pair of malicious users \(\{S,R\}\) is trying to transfer information while the rest of the protocol tries to prevent it. The messages transferred are encoded by behavioral choices at some precise moments, and decoded by a transducer whose input vocabulary is an observation of the system. We then characterize the presence of a covert channel as the existence of a winning strategy for \(\{S,R\}\) and of a decoder.
For the entire collection see [Zbl 1271.68061].

MSC:

68M12 Network protocols
91A80 Applications of game theory
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