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 read20 posts in category “Software”.
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 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 read126 head-to-head benchmarks against hpke-rs and rust-hpke. hpke-ng wins 103, ties 19, loses 4. ML-KEM-1024 decap −55%, X25519 decap −41%, export −72% to −76%, end-to-end roundtrip −30%, plus a type system that catches four classes of bug at compile time.
26 min readVerifpal 0.51.0 tightens the analysis engine's treatment of password-qualified values, checked ASSERT? assertions, and AEAD associated data, all on the back of excellent bug reports from the community.
7 min readWe tested 15 ML-KEM and ML-DSA implementations across 5 languages, and found two conformance gaps and no security vulnerabilities.
4 min readVerifpal's analysis engine has been redesigned with a unified equational theory, provenance-tagged values, a formally grounded deduction loop, and a bounded-depth search that runs 3x faster, plus updated tooling across the board.
11 min readVerifpal now runs entirely in the browser via WebAssembly. The new Workbench at verifpal.com/workbench lets anyone write, verify, and visualize cryptographic protocol models with zero installation.
3 min readAfter seven years in Go, Verifpal has been completely rewritten in Rust, gaining a new analysis engine, massive performance improvements, a rich terminal interface, and a novel attack strategy that finds more attacks.
9 min readVerifpal 0.31.2 ships a major overhaul to active attacker analysis. Verifpal can now fully verify a model of Signal's three-message protocol, a result other tools reached years ago and that is new only for Verifpal.
7 min readKyber-K2SO version 1.0 upgrades from Kyber v3 to ML-KEM, the NIST-standardized post-quantum key encapsulation mechanism.
4 min readUnderstanding Verifpal's relationship with cryptographic protocol security.
5 min readTowards new queries, automated model translation and formalized semantics in Verifpal.
6 min readHow Verifpal sped up the formal modeling efforts for a new pandemic-tracing Protocol.
8 min read