Happy new year! 2014 starts well with a new publication!

Happy new year 2014!

A new publication related to the development of APTE was added: APTE: an Algorithm for Proving Trace Equivalence. This is a tool demonstration paper that will be published and presented in the Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Tools and Algorithms for the Construction and Analysis of Systems (TACAS’14).

Abstract: This paper presents APTE, a new tool for automatically proving the security of cryptographic protocols. It focuses on proving trace equivalence between processes, which is crucial for specifying privacy type properties such as anonymity and unlinkability.

The tool can handle protocols expressed in a calculus similar to the applied-pi calculus, which allows us to capture most existing protocols that rely on classical cryptographic primitives. In particular, APTE handles private channels and else branches in protocols with bounded number of sessions. Unlike most equivalence verifier tools, APTE is guaranteed to terminate. Moreover, APTE is the only tool that extends the usual notion of trace equivalence by considering side-channel information leaked to the attacker such as the length of messages and the execution times. We illustrate APTE on different case studies which allowed us to automatically (re)-discover attacks on protocols such as the Private Authentication protocol or the protocols of the electronic passports.