Adversary Modelling: Evaluating the feasibility of symbolic adversary model on smart transport ticketing system

Nowadays, smart card has already been adopted in many public transport ticketing system. This make the security and mutual authentication of the card and reader becomes an important factor to consider. In order to prove the security level and the security properties needed in the communication, formal symbolic adversaries modelling approach are analysed and illustrated in this project and a new approach is proposed. The proposed model base on the Process Algebra CSP model with additional consideration on the cryptographic algorithm and the change of the adversary knowledge set. This can give a more thorough analysis and consideration on the whole network environment. Three protocols will be used as the target of illustration for the proposed modelling approach. They include the original MiFare Classic authentication protocol which some other researchers dismantle it in some of the papers. Also, there exists some protocol proposed by other researchers to improve base on the original authentication protocol after the discovery of flaws in the original one. Two of them are chosen in this paper for the illustration. There will be a brief description of those protocols before the illustration of the new approach for modelling. The primary target for the new modelling approach is to consider a complete running network environment of the smart transport ticketing system and hope to have a formal way to study this kind of contactless communication of smart ticketing system protocol implementation.