Prototyping Formal Methods Tools: A Protocol Analysis Case Study

Abigail Siegel, Mia Santomauro, Tristan Dyer, Tim Nelson, Shriram Krishnamurthi

FestSchrift for Joshua Guttman, 2021

Abstract

Modern-day formal methods tools are more than just a core solver: they also need convenient languages, useful editors, usable visualizations, and often also scriptability. These are required to attract a community of users, to put ideas to work in practice, and to conduct evaluations of the formalisms and core technical ideas. Off-the-shelf solvers address one of these issues but not the others. How can full prototype environments be obtained quickly?

We have built Forge, a system for prototyping such environments. In this paper, we present a case-study to assess the utility of Forge. Concretely, we use Forge to build a basic protocol analyzer, inspired by the Cryptographic Protocol Shape Analyzer (CPSA). We show that we can obtain editing, basic visualization, and scriptability at no extra cost beyond embedding in Forge, and a modern, domain-specific visualization for relatively little extra effort.

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