Reconstruction of attacks against cryptographic protocols

We study an automatic technique for the verification of cryptographic protocols based on a Horn clause model of the protocol. This technique yields proofs valid for an unbounded number of sessions of the protocol. However, up to now, it gave no definite information when the proof failed. In this paper, we present an algorithm for reconstructing an attack against the protocol when the desired security property does not hold. We have proved soundness, termination, as well as a partial completeness result for our algorithm. We have also implemented it in the automatic protocol verifier ProVerif. As an extreme example, we could reconstruct an attack involving 200 parallel sessions against f/sup 200/g/sup 200/ protocol (Millen, 1999).