Protocol Dialects as Formal Patterns

D. Galán, Víctor García, Santiago Escobar, Catherine A. Meadows, José Meseguer

Abstract: A protocol dialect is a lightweight method to obfuscate the communication exchanges between legitimate protocol users to make it hard for malicious users to interact with legitimate ones. So far, dialects have been based on a single obfuscation transformation, which we call a lingo. In this work dialects are generalized to become protocol and lingo generic. In this way they can be composed with other dialects for greater security. We present a formal semantics of dialects as formal patterns, i.e., as protocol transformations formalized in rewriting logic. We also present several attacker models and explain how our generalized notion of dialect can be used to harden dialects against such attackers.