A SAT-Based Planning Approach for Finding Logical Attacks on Cryptographic Protocols

Cryptographic protocols form the backbone of digital society. They are concurrent multiparty communication protocols that use cryptography to achieve security goals such as confidentiality, authenticity, integrity, etc., in the presence of adversaries. Unfortunately, protocol verification still represents a critical task and a major cost to engineer attack-free security protocols. Model checking and SAT-based techniques proved quite effective in this context. This article proposes an efficient automatic model checking approach that exemplifies a security property violation. In this approach, a protocol verification is abstracted as a compact planning problem, which is efficiently solved by a state-of-the-art SAT solver. The experiments performed on some real-world cryptographic protocols succeeded in detecting new logical attacks, violating some security properties. Those attacks encompass both “type flaw” and “replay” attacks, which are difficult to tackle with the existing planning-based approaches.