A Comparative Study of Protocols’ Security Verification Tools: Avispa, Scyther, ProVerif, and Tamarin

The proliferation of Internet and network-based services has experienced significant growth, leading to the creation of novel security protocols across many different systems. This includes communication protocols, authentication protocols, group key management schemes, etc. Nevertheless, the complicated structure of these protocols frequently poses challenges for humans to evaluate and validate them properly. To ensure the efficiency of these security protocols, it is crucial to examine and verify them thoroughly before deployment. Consequently, researchers have developed user-friendly automatic validation tools that generate easily comprehensible output. In this paper, we performed a comparative examination of the four most commonly used security analysis and verification tools in the literature: AVISPA, Scyther, ProVerif, and Tamarin. Gaining a comprehensive understanding of each tool’s distinct attributes, functionalities, domains of application, and constraints will enable researchers and professionals to make well-informed decisions when selecting the most suitable tool for their requirements.