Planning-Based Security Testing of the SSL/TLS Protocol

Abstract

With a growing amount of transferred data in an interconnected world, the insurance of a secure communication between two peers becomes a critical task in the software industry. A leak of critical data can cause tremendous costs in a financial, social but also political manner. For this sake, cryptographic protocols are implemented and regulate the data transfer, thus ensuring the safety of transferred data between two peers. The widespread security protocol SSL/TLS provides the mechanisms for this request, however, not without drawbacks since several security leaks have been identified up to now. Since vulnerabilities act as a starting point for a potential malicious action, the identification of such leaks is of highest priority. In this paper a novel testing approach is presented, which adapts planning for security testing of cryptographic protocols. The whole approach is implemented in one testing framework. Its purpose is to automatically test for known vulnerabilities in protocol implementations but to trigger other unintended behavior as well so eventually new security flaws can be identified. Additionally, the planning specification can be extended further so new testing possibilities can be generated. New test cases can be generated dynamically according to changing conditions.