Security protocols are concurrent processes that communicate using
cryptography with the aim of achieving various security properties. Recent work
on their formal verification has brought procedures and tools for deciding
trace equivalence properties (e.g., anonymity, unlinkability, vote secrecy) for
a bounded number of sessions. However, these procedures are based on a naive
symbolic exploration of all traces of the considered processes which,
unsurprisingly, greatly limits the scalability and practical impact of the
verification tools.
In this paper, we overcome this difficulty by developing partial order
reduction techniques for the verification of security protocols. We provide
reduced transition systems that optimally eliminate redundant traces, and which
are adequate for model-checking trace equivalence properties of protocols by
means of symbolic execution. We have implemented our reductions in the tool
Apte, and demonstrated that it achieves the expected speedup on various
protocols
