Tree Automata for Detecting Attacks on Protocols with Algebraic Cryptographic Primitives

This paper extends a rewriting approximations-based theoretical framework in which the security problem – secrecy preservation against an active intruder – may be semi-decided through a reachability analysis. In a recent paper, we have shown how to semi-decide whether a security protocol using algebraic properties of cryptographic primitives is safe. In this paper, we investigate the dual - insecurity - problem: we explain how to semi-decide whether a protocol using cryptographic primitive algebraic properties is unsafe. This improvement offers us to draw automatically a complete diagnostic of a security protocol with an unbounded number of sessions. Furthermore, our approach is supported by the tool TA4SP successfully applied for analysing the NSPK-xor protocol and the Diffie-Hellman protocol.