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Details of Grant 

EPSRC Reference: GR/S98139/01
Title: Automated Analysis of Security Critical Systems
Principal Investigator: Bundy, Professor A
Other Investigators:
Fleuriot, Professor J
Researcher Co-Investigators:
Dr G Steel
Project Partners:
CESG nCipher Corporation Ltd
Department: Sch of Informatics
Organisation: University of Edinburgh
Scheme: Standard Research (Pre-FEC)
Starts: 01 October 2004 Ends: 30 September 2007 Value (£): 183,664
EPSRC Research Topic Classifications:
Artificial Intelligence Fundamentals of Computing
EPSRC Industrial Sector Classifications:
Communications
Related Grants:
Panel History:  
Summary on Grant Application Form
This project will develop a prototype tool for automated security analysis of protocols used in electronic payment systems. We will be focusing on the analysis of protocols at the Application Program Interface (API) level. A number of attacks have been found on these APIs causing information to be revealed that would make lucrative fraud possible. These attacks have been discovered by a mixture of manual and ad-hoc formal techniques. We aim to produce a tool to assist designers and hardware manufacturers in finding these flaws automatically, and to allow them to find ways to protect against them. The CORAL system, which was designed to analyse cryptographic security protocols specified inductively in first-order logic, will serve as a starting point for the work. It will be extended to enable reasoning about the complexity of breaking particular cryptographic functions in the context of information revealed by the API. We will also examine ways to check that a previously detected flaw has been fixed in a new design. The novel combination of these ideas will result in a working prototype for a crime prevention tool of genuine value.
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Organisation Website: http://www.ed.ac.uk