Many decision problems on security protocols can be reduced to solving
so-called intruder constraints in Dolev Yao model. Most constraint solving
procedures for protocol security rely on two properties of constraint systems
called monotonicity and variable origination. In this work we relax these
restrictions by giving a decision procedure for solving general intruder
constraints (that do not have these properties) that stays in NP. Our result
extends a first work by L. Mazar\'e in several directions: we allow non-atomic
keys, and an associative, commutative and idempotent symbol (for modeling
sets). We also discuss several new applications of the results.Comment: Submitted to the Special issue of Information and Computation on
Security and Rewriting Techniques (SecReT), 2011. 59 page