AutoTam: Specifying Secure Protocol Implementations with Tamarin Model Generation

2026-06-18

AI Summary

This work addresses the high barrier to entry in formal verification of cryptographic protocols and the difficulty of tracing verification results back to concrete implementations. The authors propose a domain-specific language (DSL)-centric development methodology that pioneers a “language-first” modeling paradigm. Their approach automatically translates protocol implementations into Tamarin-verifiable models and integrates symbolic execution to ensure memory safety. This framework guarantees that general trace properties established through formal verification are correctly mapped back to the original source code. Empirical evaluation demonstrates the successful generation of precise models for Signed Diffie-Hellman and WireGuard protocols; notably, the resulting WireGuard implementation achieves interoperability, practical usability, and compositional security guarantees.

Abstract

Formal verification is a challenging but important task for ensuring the security of cryptographic protocols. While modern protocol verification tools significantly reduce verification effort, modelling remains challenging to practitioners without a background in formal verification. In addition, transferring verification results to a concrete protocol implementation requires expert knowledge. In this paper, we present a novel language-first method for verification of trace properties using a domain-specific language for protocol implementations. We target the Tamarin prover for verification, and we prove that verified universal trace properties translate back to the implementation. We additionally integrate symbolic execution in order to analyse the memory safety of protocol implementations. We use our tool to implement and generate accurate models for a signed Diffie-Hellman protocol, and for the WireGuard VPN protocol. Our WireGuard implementation is interoperable with existing implementations when using our interpreter, and achieves acceptable performance. We formally prove our implementations secure using a combination of symbolic execution and verification of the generated Tamarin models.

Problem

• formal verification
• cryptographic protocols
• protocol implementation
• Tamarin prover
• trace properties

Innovation

• language-first verification
• Tamarin model generation
• symbolic execution
• domain-specific language
• trace property preservation