POSTER: Towards Precise and Automated Verification of Security Protocols in Coq

Abstract

Security protocol verification using commonly-used model-checkers or symbolic protocol verifiers has several intrinsic limitations. Spin suffers the state explosion problem; Proverif may report false attacks. An alternative approach is to use Coq. However, the effort required to verify protocols in Coq is high for two main reasons: correct protocol and property specification is a non-trivial task, and security proofs lack automation. This work claims that (1) using Coq for verification of cryptographic protocols can sometimes yield better results than Spin and Proverif, and (2) the verification process in Coq can be greatly alleviated if specification and proof engineering techniques are applied. Our approach is evaluated by verifying several representative case studies. Preliminary results are encouraging, we were able to verify two protocols that give imprecise results in Spin and Proverif, respectively. Further, we have automated proofs of secrecy and authentication for an important class of protocols.