A comparative study of security protocols validation tools: HERMES vs. AVISPA

Security protocols require more rigorous and detailed verification than normal communication protocols before their deployment because even a trivial flaw in their architecture may produce drastic results. These verification procedures are based upon the abstract formal methods producing analytical rules to show if a given protocol is secure or not. The technical difficulties to master formal techniques by non-mathematicians have given rise to online validation tools which are easy to use and produce a human readable output. These online tools differ in many parameters. Our work is aimed to present a qualitative comparison of two automatic security protocol analysers Hermes and AVISPA for the some pertinent parameters.