Abstract. Symbolic encryption, in the style of Dolev-Yao models, is ubiquitous in formal security models. In its common use, encryption on a whole message is specified as a single monolithic block. From a cryptographic perspective, however, this may require a resource-intensive cryptographic algorithm, namely an authenticated encryption scheme that is secure under chosen ciphertext attack. Therefore, many reasonable encryption schemes, such as AES in the CBC or CFB mode 1 , are not among the implementation options.In this paper, we report new attacks on CBC and CFB based implementations of the well-known Needham-Schroeder and Denning-Sacco protocols. To avoid such problems, we advocate the use of refined notions of symbolic encryption that have natural correspondence to standard cryptographic encryption schemes.