ShannonProver: Towards Automating Formal Cryptographic Proofs

2026-07-02

AI Summary

This work addresses the growing complexity of cryptographic proofs and the high cost of manual verification and formal proof scripting. To tackle this challenge, the paper introduces ShannonProver, an agent-based automated framework that integrates with the EasyCrypt tool to synthesize formal proof scripts from user-specified security models and lemma-level proof obligations. This approach achieves, for the first time, the automated synthesis of proofs for numerous complex obligations arising in real-world protocols such as ChaChaPoly1305 and MEE-CBC. Evaluated on a diverse dataset encompassing textbook primitives, deployed protocols, and NIST proposals, ShannonProver substantially lowers the barrier to formal verification, thereby accelerating the development and deployment of trustworthy cryptographic protocols.

Abstract

Cryptographic proofs are produced at a scale that increasingly exceeds the community's ability to verify them manually. Machine-checked proofs offer a path toward scalable proof verification, but writing proof scripts for expressive proof assistants such as EasyCrypt remains a major bottleneck: even when the high-level proof plan is known, converting it into proof tactics requires substantial reasoning effort. This paper presents ShannonProver, an agentic framework for automating cryptographic proofs. ShannonProver targets the setting in which a cryptographer provides the security model and a decomposition of the target theorem into lemma-level proof obligations, while the system automatically constructs EasyCrypt proof scripts for those obligations. We evaluate ShannonProver on a dataset of formal cryptographic proofs in EasyCrypt. The dataset spans textbook primitives, deployed protocols, and standardization efforts such as NIST proposals, and includes expert case studies drawn from a corpus that has not previously been available online. We show that ShannonProver can automate substantial portions of cryptographic proof engineering for case studies such as ChaChaPoly1305 and MEE-CBC. More broadly, this work suggests a path toward accelerating cryptographic research: as agents automate the proof-engineering burden, cryptographers can iterate more quickly on new constructions, obtain machine-checked assurance earlier, and bring trustworthy protocols from design to deployment faster.

Problem

• cryptographic proofs
• proof automation
• formal verification
• proof assistants
• EasyCrypt

Innovation

• automated cryptographic proofs
• formal verification
• proof automation
• EasyCrypt
• agentic framework