The UMBC Cyber Defense Lab presents

Analysis of the Secure Remote Password (SRP) Protocol Using CPSA

Erin Lanus, UMBC Cyber Defense Lab

12:00–1:00pm, Friday, 6 September 2019, ITE 227, UMBC

Joint work with Alan Sherman, Richard Chang, Enis Golaszewski, Ryan Wnuk-Fink, Cyrus Bonyadi, Mario Costa, Moses Liskov, and Edward Zieglar

Secure Remote Password (SRP) is a widely deployed password authenticated key exchange (PAKE) protocol used in products such as 1Password and iCloud Keychain. As with other PAKE protocols, the two participants in SRP use knowledge of a pre-shared password to authenticate each other and establish a session key. I will explain the SRP protocol and security goals it seeks to achieve. I will demonstrate how to model the protocol using the Cryptographic Protocol Shapes Analyzer (CPSA) tool and present my analysis of the shapes produced by CPSA.

Erin Lanus earned her Ph.D. in computer science in May 2019 from Arizona State University. Dr. Lanus is currently conducting research with Professor Sherman’s Protocol Analysis Lab at UMBC. Her previous results include how to use state to enable CPSA to reason about time in forced-latency protocols. Her research also explored algorithmic approaches to constructing combinatorial arrays employed in interaction testing and the creation of a new type of array for attribute distribution to achieve anonymous authorization in attribute-based systems. In October she will begin as a research assistant professor at Virginia Tech’s Hume Center in Northern Virginia. email:

Support for this research was provided in part by grants to CISA from the Department of Defense, CySP grants H98230-17-1-0387 and H98230-18-0321.