Verifpal Takes on TLS 1.3
An 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 readFormal Verification.
20 posts tagged “Formal Verification”.
How Verifpal Finds a 3-of-5 Threshold-Signature Forgery
A 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: More Accurate Protocol Analysis
Verifpal 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: Who Alice Thinks She's Talking To
Verifpal 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 Reaches 1.0: A Toy Becomes an Instrument
Verifpal 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: Nuancing Weak Cryptography Modeling and Witness-Based Unlinkability
Verifpal 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: Post-Quantum Key Exchange, and an Attacker That Works Backwards
Verifpal 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 readVerifpal 0.51.0: Sharper Semantics for Passwords, Assertions, and AEAD
Verifpal 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 readThe Verification Facade: Structural Gaps in Cryspen's Hax Pipeline
Five proof-of-concept exploits against ML-DSA, ML-KEM, Ed25519, and ChaCha20 demonstrate three classes of semantic gap in hax's Rust-to-F* extraction pipeline, where verified models diverge from deployed code.
11 min readCE Labs' Approach to TLS: A Critical Analysis
An examination of CE Labs' TLS implementations reveals 75% of valid ECDSA signatures rejected, authentication tags silently dropped, no certificate validation, and remote denial-of-service vectors.
11 min readMaking Verifpal Easier to Reason About
Verifpal'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 Workbench: Protocol Analysis in Your Browser
Verifpal 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 readVerifpal, Rewritten in Rust
After 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 readEven More Bugs in CE Labs' libcrux: ML-DSA
Three findings in libcrux's ML-DSA implementation: a verifier norm check that is dead code due to a wrong constant, a missing bounds check in hint deserialization, and a wrong multiplication specification that renders AVX2 proofs unsound.
12 min readWe Found Bugs in CE Labs' Verified Code
CE Labs said they'd be 'very interested' if someone found a bug in their verified code. We found three.
13 min readVerifpal Verifies Signal Across Three Messages
Verifpal 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 readOn the Promises of 'High-Assurance' Cryptography
A case study on CE Labs' libcrux exposing the gap between formal verification marketing and engineering reality.
10 min readOne Year of Verifpal
Understanding Verifpal's relationship with cryptographic protocol security.
5 min readBetter Queries for Verifpal
Towards new queries, automated model translation and formalized semantics in Verifpal.
6 min readModeling DP-3T With Verifpal
How Verifpal sped up the formal modeling efforts for a new pandemic-tracing Protocol.
8 min read