Review on Modelling and Verification of Secure Exams

Exams are an important way for assessing people’s skills and, as such, play a key role in establishing meritocracy in modern societies. To be effective, however, exams need to be fair and secure against tampering which is where Rosario Giustolisi’s book “Modelling and Verification of Secure Exams” [5] comes to a rescue. Over 133 pages, the book describes how to formalize and verify various types of exams. It is best suited for an audience with background in formal methods as well as security wanting to learn more about how formal methods can be used for the design and analysis of secure exam protocols. The book provides a nice overview of key elements of different types of exams, leading to a good understanding of exam protocols in general. To start with, the book introduces basic aspects of an exam, such as roles and principals, phases, and potential threats. In addition, different types of exams, such as traditional, computer-assisted, computer-based, internet-assisted, and internet-based, are identified and briefly discussed. The book even shows how to formally model an exam in the applied pi-calculus [1] as the concurrent execution of different types of processes, such as candidates, examiners, question committee, collector, and remaining authorities. Of particular interest are the various security requirements identified for exams and the way they are formalized. To this end, the book describes three types of security requirements: Authentication is formalized in terms of correspondence properties of the form “if a certain event happens then another event must have happened before”. Privacy requirements are formalized as special kind of bisimilarity requirements. To formalize verifiability requirements, the author first introduces an alternative definition of an exam (compared to the process algebraic one) based on basic set theory. Verifiability is then formulated as a predicate-logic formula over the model. Here, clarity is diminished by the fact that the book uses a mix of two different formalisms: while the applied