Verifpal 1.5: Auditing the Verifier with Frontier AI Models
Verifpal 1.5 is out: an audit with frontier AI models fixes false reports, missed attacks, and a crash. We also explain how Verifpal compares with ProVerif and Tamarin.
17 min readAudit reports, security advisories, software releases, research, and essays.
Verifpal 1.5 is out: an audit with frontier AI models fixes false reports, missed attacks, and a crash. We also explain how Verifpal compares with ProVerif and Tamarin.
17 min readAn overnight analysis, nineteen security queries, and three expected counterexamples: modeling TLS 1.3 with concurrent sessions, malicious certified peers, completion preconditions, and staged key compromise.
10 min readA walkthrough of Verifpal 1.4.4's FROST-shaped model: two signing oracles and one leaked share cross a 3-of-5 threshold, producing a valid signature without disclosing the group key.
8 min readVerifpal 1.4 fixes false positives caused by combining incompatible protocol runs, detects two previously missed attacks, corrects precondition semantics, adds clearer verdict labels, gives AEAD a nonce so that nonce reuse can be modelled, and removes password-specific syntax.
23 min readVerifpal 1.3 adds peer scenarios, which instantiate a principal's counterparty differently across concurrent runs. That is what finally lets Verifpal find Lowe's attack on Needham-Schroeder and tell that protocol apart from its fix. Alongside it, every passing query now prints the envelope it was reached under, --saturate raises the session count until verdicts stop moving, and --auto-queries generates a query set from the model.
13 min readVerifpal 1.0 removes the beta warning the tool has printed with every analysis since 2020, on the strength of a new paper. The language now covers post-quantum key exchange, declared weakening assumptions, witness-based unlinkability, and two concurrent sessions of every principal; the engine behind it comes with a soundness theorem that holds however the solver behaves, unconditional termination, and attack traces measured for readability against ProVerif and Tamarin.
20 min readVerifpal 0.80.0 lets a model declare that a particular piece of cryptography is broken (weak, forgeable, and from a chosen phase onward) instead of approximating the break with a list of leaked values, and decides unlinkability queries by searching for a concrete link witness that it then reports back to you.
19 min readVerifpal 0.70.0 removes Diffie-Hellman equations from the modelling language, adds a generic KEM for post-quantum and hybrid key exchange, rebuilds the active attacker around a search that works backwards from each query, and narrates every attack it finds as numbered causal steps.
20 min readFive people joined us this summer: two research interns formalizing zkVM soundness bounds in Lean, and three teaching assistants running the Applied Cryptography course. Here they are, in their own words.
4 min readCedarcrypt's first edition has concluded. On what a year of teaching cryptography in and for Lebanon has meant, why the conference met in Cyprus rather than Beirut, and the decades of work ahead.
12 min readA playground-first, interactive explainer for Jevil, a post-quantum, transparent few-time signature scheme whose key-recovery threshold is a single sharp cliff rather than a slow slope.
11 min readA note on Symbolic Software's technical review of Telegram's MTProto protocol, made public in 2026 through litigation. Covers the auth_key_id tracking vulnerability, the empirical case against Telegram's 'changes regularly' rebuttal, the editorial independence terms of the engagement, and how the document entered the public record.
13 min read