@inproceedings{protzenko2017verified,
author = {Protzenko, Jonathan and Zinzindohoue, Jean Karim and Rastogi, Aseem and Ramananandro, Tahina and Wang, Peng and Zanella-Béguelin, Santiago and Delignat-Lavaud, Antoine and Hriţcu, Cătălin and Bhargavan, Karthikeyan and Fournet, Cédric and Swamy, Nikhil},
title = {Verified Low-Level Programming Embedded in F*},
booktitle = {22nd International Conference on Functional Programming (ICFP 2017)},
year = {2017},
month = {May},
abstract = {We present Low*, a language for low-level programming and verification, and its application to high-assurance optimized cryptographic libraries. Low* is a shallow embedding of a small, sequential, well-behaved subset of C in F*, a dependently- typed variant of ML aimed at program verification. Departing from ML, Low* does not involve any garbage collection or implicit heap allocation; instead, it has a structured memory model à la CompCert, and it provides the control required for writing efficient low-level security-critical code.

By virtue of typing, any Low* program is memory safe. In addition, the programmer can make full use of the verification power of F* to write high-level specifications and verify the functional correctness of Low* code using a combination of SMT automation and sophisticated manual proofs. At extraction time, specifications and proofs are erased, and the remaining code enjoys a predictable translation to C. We prove that this translation preserves semantics and side-channel resistance.
We provide a new compiler back-end from Low* to C and, to evaluate our approach, we implement and verify various cryptographic algorithms, constructions, and tools for a total of about 28,000 lines of code. We show that our Low* code delivers performance competitive with existing (unverified) C cryptographic libraries, suggesting our approach may be applicable to larger-scale low-level software.

In cooperation with: INRIA Paris, Team Prosecco; and MIT, CSAIL.

Docker image submitted to the ICFP 2017 artifact evaluation.},
publisher = {ACM SIGPLAN},
url = {http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-us/research/publication/verified-low-level-programming-embedded-f/},
}