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OFMC: A symbolic model checker for security protocols

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Abstract

We present the on-the-fly model checker OFMC, a tool that combines two ideas for analyzing security protocols based on lazy, demand-driven search. The first is the use of lazy data types as a simple way of building efficient on-the-fly model checkers for protocols with very large, or even infinite, state spaces. The second is the integration of symbolic techniques and optimizations for modeling a lazy Dolev–Yao intruder whose actions are generated in a demand-driven way. We present both techniques, along with optimizations and proofs of correctness and completeness.

Our tool is state of the art in terms of both coverage and performance. For example, it finds all known attacks and discovers a new one in a test suite of 38 protocols from the Clark/Jacob library in a few seconds of CPU time for the entire suite. We also give examples demonstrating how our tool scales to, and finds errors in, large industrial-strength protocols.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, ETH Zurich, CH-8092, Zurich, Switzerland

    David Basin, Sebastian Mödersheim & Luca Viganò

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  1. David Basin
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  2. Sebastian Mödersheim
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  3. Luca Viganò
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Correspondence to David Basin.

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Basin, D., Mödersheim, S. & Viganò, L. OFMC: A symbolic model checker for security protocols. Int J Inf Secur 4, 181–208 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10207-004-0055-7

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