We study decision procedures for two knowledge problems critical to the verification of security protocols, namely the intruder deduction and the static equivalence problems. These problems can be related to particular forms of context matching and context unification. Both problems are defined with respect to an equational theory and are known to be decidable when the equational theory is given by a subterm convergent term rewrite system (TRS). In this work, we extend this to consider a subterm convergent TRS defined modulo an equational theory, like Commutativity. We present two pairs of solutions for these important problems. The first solves the deduction and static equivalence problems in rewrite systems modulo shallow theories such as Commutativity. The second provides a general procedure that solves the deduction and static equivalence problems in subterm convergent systems modulo syntactic permutative theories, provided a finite measure is ensured. Several examples of such theories are also given.

Automatic techniques for program verification usually suffer the well-known state explosion problem. Most of the classical approaches are based on browsing the structure of some form of model (which represents the behavior of the program) to check if a given specification is valid. This implies that a part of the model has to be built, and sometimes the needed fragment is quite huge.

In this work, we provide an alternative automatic decision method to check whether a given property, specified in a linear temporal logic, is valid w.r.t. a tccp program. Our proposal (based on abstract interpretation techniques) does not require to build any model at all. Our results guarantee correctness but, as usual when using an abstract semantics, completeness is lost.