ProVerif with Lemmas‚ Induction‚ Fast Subsumption‚ and Much More

Abstract

This paper presents a major overhaul of one the most widely used symbolic security protocol verifiers, ProVerif. We provide two main contributions. First, we extend ProVerif with lemmas, axioms, proofs by induction, natural numbers, and temporal queries. These features not only extend the scope of ProVerif, but can also be used to improve its precision (that is, avoid false attacks) and make it terminate more often. Second, we rework and optimize many of the algorithms used in ProVerif (generation of clauses, resolution, subsumption, ...), resulting in impressive speed-ups on large examples.