Performance Evaluations of Cryptographic Protocols Verification Tools Dealing with Algebraic Properties

There exist several automatic verification tools of cryptographic protocols, but only few of them are able to check protocols in presence of algebraic properties. Most of these tools are dealing either with Exclusive-Or (XOR) and exponentiation properties, so-called DiffieHellman (DH). In the last few years, the number of these tools increased and some existing tools have been updated. Our aim is to compare their performances by analysing a selection of cryptographic protocols using XOR and DH. We compare execution time and memory consumption for different versions of the following tools OFMC, CL-Atse, Scyther, Tamarin, TA4SP, and extensions of ProVerif (XOR-ProVerif and DHProVerif). Our evaluation shows that in most of the cases the new versions of the tools are faster but consume more memory. We also show how the new tools: Tamarin, Scyther and TA4SP, can be compared to previous ones. We also discover and understand for the protocol IKEv2DS a difference of modelling by the authors of different tools, which leads to different security results. Finally, for Exclusive-Or and Diffie-Hellman properties, we construct two families of protocols Pxori and Pdhi that allow us to clearly see for the first time the impact of the number of operators and variables in the tools’ performances.