Search

Verifying imperative programs is hard. A key difficulty is that the specification of what an imperative program does is often intertwined with details about pointers and imperative state. Although there are a number of powerful separation logics that allow the details of imperative state to be captured and managed, these details are complicated and reasoning about them requires significant time and expertise. In this paper, we take a different approach: a memory-safe type system that, as part of type-checking, extracts functional specifications from imperative programs. This disentangles imperative state, which is handled by the type system, from functional specifications, which can be verified without reference to pointers. A key difficulty is that sometimes memory safety depends crucially on the functional specification of a program; e.g., an array index is only memory-safe if the index is in bounds. To handle this case, our specification extraction inserts dynamic checks into the specification. Verification then requires the additional proof that none of these checks fail. However, these checks are in a purely functional language, and so this proof also requires no reasoning about pointers.

International audience; This paper presents a novel formal semantics, mechanized in Coq, for a large, sequential subset of the LLVM IR. In contrast to previous approaches, which use relationally-specified operational semantics, this new semantics is based on monadic interpretation of interaction trees, a structure that provides a more compositional approach to defining language semantics while retaining the ability to extract an executable interpreter. Our semantics handles many of the LLVM IR's non-trivial language features and is constructed modularly in terms of event handlers, including those that deal with nondeterminism in the specification. We show how this semantics admits compositional reasoning principles derived from the interaction trees equational theory of weak bisimulation, which we extend here to better deal with nondeterminism, and we use them to prove that the extracted reference interpreter faithfully refines the semantic model. We validate the correctness of the semantics by evaluating it on unit tests and LLVM IR programs generated by HELIX.

This paper extends the Dijkstra monad framework, designed for writing specifications over effectful programs using monadic effects, to handle termination sensitive specifications over interactive programs. We achieve this by introducing base specification monads for non-terminating programs with uninterpreted events. We model such programs using interaction trees, a coinductive datatype for representing programs with algebraic effects in Coq, which we further develop by adding trace semantics. We show that this approach subsumes typical, simple proof principles. The framework is implemented as an extension of the Interaction Trees Coq library.

"Interaction trees" (ITrees) are a general-purpose data structure for representing the behaviors of recursive programs that interact with their environments. A coinductive variant of "free monads," ITrees are built out of uninterpreted events and their continuations. They support compositional construction of interpreters from "event handlers", which give meaning to events by defining their semantics as monadic actions. ITrees are expressive enough to represent impure and potentially nonterminating, mutually recursive computations, while admitting a rich equational theory of equivalence up to weak bisimulation. In contrast to other approaches such as relationally specified operational semantics, ITrees are executable via code extraction, making them suitable for debugging, testing, and implementing software artifacts that are amenable to formal verification. We have implemented ITrees and their associated theory as a Coq library, mechanizing classic domain- and category-theoretic results about program semantics, iteration, monadic structures, and equational reasoning. Although the internals of the library rely heavily on coinductive proofs, the interface hides these details so that clients can use and reason about ITrees without explicit use of Coq's coinduction tactics. To showcase the utility of our theory, we prove the termination-sensitive correctness of a compiler from a simple imperative source language to an assembly-like target whose meanings are given in an ITree-based denotational semantics. Unlike previous results using operational techniques, our bisimulation proof follows straightforwardly by structural induction and elementary rewriting via an equational theory of combinators for control-flow graphs., Comment: 28 pages, 4 pages references, published at POPL 2020

We present a principled automatic testing framework for application-layer protocols. The key innovation is a domain-specific embedded language for writing nondeterministic models of the behavior of networked servers. These models are defined within the Coq interactive theorem prover, supporting a smooth transition from testing to formal verification. Given a server model, we show how to automatically derive a tester that probes the server for unexpected behaviors. We address the uncertainties caused by both the server's internal choices and the network delaying messages nondeterministically. The derived tester accepts server implementations whose possible behaviors are a subset of those allowed by the nondeterministic model. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this framework by using it to specify and test a fragment of the HTTP/1.1 protocol, showing that the automatically derived tester can capture RFC violations in buggy server implementations, including the latest versions of Apache and Nginx., Comment: 11 pages, 15 figures

This paper introduces QWIRE (``choir''), a language for defining quantum circuits and an interface for manipulating them inside of an arbitrary classical host language. QWIRE is minimal---it contains only a few primitives---and sound with respect to the physical properties entailed by quantum mechanics. At the same time, QWIRE is expressive and highly modular due to its relationship with the host language, mirroring the QRAM model of computation that places a quantum computer (controlled by circuits) alongside a classical computer (controlled by the host language). We present QWIRE along with its type system and operational semantics, which we prove is safe and strongly normalizing whenever the host language is. We give circuits a denotational semantics in terms of density matrices. Throughout, we investigate examples that demonstrate the expressive power of QWIRE, including extensions to the host language that (1) expose a general analysis framework for circuits, and (2) provide dependent types.

Secure multi-party computation (MPC) allows a group of mutually distrustful parties to compute a joint function on their inputs without revealing any information beyond the result of the computation. This type of computation is extremely powerful and has wide-ranging applications in academia, industry, and government. Protocols for secure computation have existed for decades, but only recently have general-purpose compilers for executing MPC on arbitrary functions been developed. These projects rapidly improved the state of the art, and began to make MPC accessible to non-expert users. However, the field is changing so rapidly that it is difficult even for experts to keep track of the varied capabilities of modern frameworks. In this work, we survey general-purpose compilers for secure multi-party computation. These tools provide high-level abstractions to describe arbitrary functions and execute secure computation protocols. We consider eleven systems: EMP-toolkit, Obliv-C, ObliVM, TinyGarble, SCALE-MAMBA (formerly SPDZ), Wysteria, Sharemind, PICCO, ABY, Frigate and CBMC-GC. We evaluate these systems on a range of criteria, including language expressibility, capabilities of the cryptographic back-end, and accessibility to developers. We advocate for improved documentation of MPC frameworks, standardization within the community, and make recommendations for future directions in compiler development. Installing and running these systems can be challenging, and for each system, we also provide a complete virtual environment (Docker container) with all the necessary dependencies to run the compiler and our example programs.

Common quantum algorithms make heavy use of ancillae: scratch qubits that are initialized at some state and later returned to that state and discarded. Existing quantum circuit languages let programmers assert that a qubit has been returned to the |0> state before it is discarded, allowing for a range of optimizations. However, existing languages do not provide the tools to verify these assertions, introducing a potential source of errors. In this paper we present methods for verifying that ancillae are discarded in the desired state, and use these methods to implement a verified compiler from classical functions to quantum oracles., In Proceedings QPL 2018, arXiv:1901.09476

We present the first formal verification of a networked server implemented in C. Interaction trees, a general structure for representing reactive computations, are used to tie together disparate verification and testing tools (Coq, VST, and QuickChick) and to axiomatize the behavior of the operating system on which the server runs (CertiKOS). The main theorem connects a specification of acceptable server behaviors, written in a straightforward "one client at a time" style, with the CompCert semantics of the C program. The variability introduced by low-level buffering of messages and interleaving of multiple TCP connections is captured using network refinement, a variant of observational refinement., 13 pages + references

We describe an embedding of the QWIRE quantum circuit language in the Coq proof assistant. This allows programmers to write quantum circuits using high-level abstractions and to prove properties of those circuits using Coq's theorem proving features. The implementation uses higher-order abstract syntax to represent variable binding and provides a type-checking algorithm for linear wire types, ensuring that quantum circuits are well-formed. We formalize a denotational semantics that interprets QWIRE circuits as superoperators on density matrices, and prove the correctness of some simple quantum programs., Comment: In Proceedings QPL 2017, arXiv:1802.09737

Establishing that two programs are contextually equivalent is hard, yet essential for reasoning about semantics preserving program transformations such as compiler optimizations. We adapt Lassen’s normal form bisimulations technique to establish the soundness of equational theories for both an untyped call-by-value \(\lambda \)-calculus and a variant of Levy’s call-by-push-value language. We demonstrate that our equational theory significantly simplifies the verification of optimizations.

Bidirectional transformations between different data representations occur frequently in modern software systems. They appear as serializers and deserializers, as database views and view updaters, and more. Manually building bidirectional transformations---by writing two separate functions that are intended to be inverses---is tedious and error prone. A better approach is to use a domain-specific language in which both directions can be written as a single expression. However, these domain-specific languages can be difficult to program in, requiring programmers to manage fiddly details while working in a complex type system. To solve this, we present Optician, a tool for type-directed synthesis of bijective string transformers. The inputs to Optician are two ordinary regular expressions representing two data formats and a few concrete examples for disambiguation. The output is a well-typed program in Boomerang (a bidirectional language based on the theory of lenses). The main technical challenge involves navigating the vast program search space efficiently enough. Unlike most prior work on type-directed synthesis, our system operates in the context of a language with a rich equivalence relation on types (the theory of regular expressions). We synthesize terms of a equivalent language and convert those generated terms into our lens language. We prove the correctness of our synthesis algorithm. We also demonstrate empirically that our new language changes the synthesis problem from one that admits intractable solutions to one that admits highly efficient solutions. We evaluate Optician on a benchmark suite of 39 examples including both microbenchmarks and realistic examples derived from other data management systems including Flash Fill, a tool for synthesizing string transformations in spreadsheets, and Augeas, a tool for bidirectional processing of Linux system configuration files., 127 Pages, Extended Version with Appendix

The lack of memory safety in languages such as C and C++ is a root source of exploitable security vulnerabilities. This article presents Watchdog, a hardware approach that eliminates such vulnerabilities by enforcing comprehensive memory safety. Inspired by prior software-only mechanisms, Watchdog maintains bounds and identifier metadata with pointers, propagates them on pointer operations, and checks them on pointer dereferences. Checking this bounds and identifier metadata provides both precise, byte-granularity buffer-overflow protection and protection from use-after-free errors, even in the presence of reallocations. Watchdog stores pointer metadata in a disjoint shadow space to provide comprehensive protection and ensure compatibility with existing code. To streamline implementation and reduce runtime overhead, Watchdog uses micro-operations to implement metadata access and checking, eliminates metadata copies via a register renaming scheme, and uses a dedicated identifier cache to reduce checking overhead.

Languages such as C and C++ use unsafe manual memory management, allowing simple bugs (i.e., accesses to an object after deallocation) to become the root cause of exploitable security vulnerabilities. This paper proposes Watchdog, a hardware-based approach for ensuring safe and secure manual memory management. Inspired by prior software-only proposals, Watchdog generates a unique identifier for each memory allocation, associates these identifiers with pointers, and checks to ensure that the identifier is still valid on every memory access. This use of identifiers and checks enables Watchdog to detect errors even in the presence of reallocations. Watchdog stores these pointer identifiers in a disjoint shadow space to provide comprehensive protection and ensure compatibility with existing code. To streamline the implementation and reduce runtime overhead: Watchdog (1) uses micro-ops to access metadata and perform checks, (2) eliminates metadata copies among registers via modified register renaming, and (3) uses a dedicated metadata cache to reduce checking overhead. Furthermore, this paper extends Watchdog's mechanisms to detect bounds errors, thereby providing full hardware-enforced memory safety at low overheads.

This paper presents Vellvm (verified LLVM), a framework for reasoning about programs expressed in LLVM's intermediate representation and transformations that operate on it. Vellvm provides a mechanized formal semantics of LLVM's intermediate representation, its type system, and properties of its SSA form. The framework is built using the Coq interactive theorem prover. It includes multiple operational semantics and proves relations among them to facilitate different reasoning styles and proof techniques. To validate Vellvm's design, we extract an interpreter from the Coq formal semantics that can execute programs from LLVM test suite and thus be compared against LLVM reference implementations. To demonstrate Vellvm's practicality, we formalize and verify a previously proposed transformation that hardens C programs against spatial memory safety violations. Vellvm's tools allow us to extract a new, verified implementation of the transformation pass that plugs into the real LLVM infrastructure; its performance is competitive with the non-verified, ad-hoc original.

The ISO C standard does not specify the semantics of many valid programs that use non-portable idioms such as integer-pointer casts. Recent efforts at formal definitions and verified implementation of the C language inherit this feature. By adopting high-level abstract memory models, they validate common optimizations. On the other hand, this prevents reasoning about much low-level code relying on the behavior of common implementations, where formal verification has many applications. We present the first formal memory model that allows many common optimizations and fully supports operations on the representation of pointers. All arithmetic operations are well-defined for pointers that have been cast to integers. Crucially, our model is also simple to understand and program with. All our results are fully formalized in Coq.

While many type systems based on the intuitionistic fragment of linear logic have been proposed, applications in programming languages of the full power of linear logic - including double-negation elimination - have remained elusive. Meanwhile, linearity has been used in many type systems for concurrent programs - e.g., session types - which suggests applicability to the problems of concurrent programming, but the ways in which linearity has interacted with concurrency primitives in lambda calculi have remained somewhat ad-hoc. In this paper we connect classical linear logic and concurrent functional programming in the language Lolliproc, which provides simple primitives for concurrency that have a direct logical interpretation and that combine to provide the functionality of session types. Lolliproc features a simple process calculus "under the hood" but hides the machinery of processes from programmers. We illustrate Lolliproc by example and prove soundness, strong normalization, and confluence results, which, among other things, guarantees freedom from deadlocks and race conditions.

Temporal memory safety errors, such as dangling pointer dereferences and double frees, are a prevalent source of software bugs in unmanaged languages such as C. Existing schemes that attempt to retrofit temporal safety for such languages have high runtime overheads and/or are incomplete, thereby limiting their effectiveness as debugging aids. This paper presents CETS, a compile-time transformation for detecting all violations of temporal safety in C programs. Inspired by existing approaches, CETS maintains a unique identifier with each object, associates this metadata with the pointers in a disjoint metadata space to retain memory layout compatibility, and checks that the object is still allocated on pointer dereferences. A formal proof shows that this is sufficient to provide temporal safety even in the presence of arbitrary casts if the program contains no spatial safety violations. Our CETS prototype employs both temporal check removal optimizations and traditional compiler optimizations to achieve a runtime overhead of just 48% on average. When combined with a spatial-checking system, the average overall overhead is 116% for complete memory safety

This paper presents AURA, a programming language for access control that treats ordinary programming constructs (e.g., integers and recursive functions) and authorization logic constructs (e.g., principals and access control policies) in a uniform way. AURA is based on polymorphic DCC and uses dependent types to permit assertions that refer directly to AURA values while keeping computation out of the assertion level to ensure tractability. The main technical results of this paper include fully mechanically verified proofs of the decidability and soundness for AURA's type system, and a prototype typechecker and interpreter.

The C programming language is at least as well known for its absence of spatial memory safety guarantees (i.e., lack of bounds checking) as it is for its high performance. C's unchecked pointer arithmetic and array indexing allow simple programming mistakes to lead to erroneous executions, silent data corruption, and security vulnerabilities. Many prior proposals have tackled enforcing spatial safety in C programs by checking pointer and array accesses. However, existing software-only proposals have significant drawbacks that may prevent wide adoption, including: unacceptably high run-time overheads, lack of completeness, incompatible pointer representations, or need for non-trivial changes to existing C source code and compiler infrastructure. Inspired by the promise of these software-only approaches, this paper proposes a hardware bounded pointer architectural primitive that supports cooperative hardware/software enforcement of spatial memory safety for C programs. This bounded pointer is a new hardware primitive datatype for pointers that leaves the standard C pointer representation intact, but augments it with bounds information maintained separately and invisibly by the hardware. The bounds are initialized by the software, and they are then propagated and enforced transparently by the hardware, which automatically checks a pointer's bounds before it is dereferenced. One mode of use requires instrumenting only malloc, which enables enforcement of perallocation spatial safety for heap-allocated objects for existing binaries. When combined with simple intraprocedural compiler instrumentation, hardware bounded pointers enable a low-overhead approach for enforcing complete spatial memory safety in unmodified C programs.

This article defines the semantics of MinAML, an idealized aspect-oriented programming language, by giving a type-directed translation from a user-friendly external language to a compact, well-defined core language. We argue that our framework is an effective way to give semantics to aspect-oriented programming languages in general because the translation eliminates shallow syntactic differences between related constructs and permits definition of an elegant and extensible core language.The core language extends the simply-typed lambda calculus with two central new abstractions: explicitly labeled program points and first-class advice. The labels serve both to trigger advice and to mark continuations that the advice may return to. These constructs are defined orthogonally to the other features of the language and we show that our abstractions can be used in both functional and object-oriented contexts. We prove Preservation and Progress lemmas for our core language and show that the translation from MinAML source into core is type-preserving. Together these two results imply that the source language is type safe. We also consider several extensions to our basic framework including a general mechanism for analyzing the current call stack.

Noninterference requires that there is no information flow from sensitive to public data in a given system. However, many systems release sensitive information as part of their intended function and therefore violate noninterference. To control information flow while permitting information release, some systems have a downgrading or declassification mechanism, but this creates the danger that it may cause unintentional information release. This paper shows that a robustness property can be used to characterize programs in which declassification mechanisms cannot be controlled by attackers to release more information than intended. It describes a simple way to provably enforce this robustness property through a type-based compile-time program analysis. The paper also presents a generalization of robustness that supports upgrading (endorsing) data integrity.

The Java-MaC framework is a run-time verification system for Java programs that can be used to dynamically test and enforce safety policies. This paper presents a formal model of the Java-MaC safety properties in terms of an operational semantics for Middleweight Java, a realistic subset of full Java. This model is intended to be used as a framework for studying the correctness of Java-MaC program instrumentation, optimizations, and future experimentation with run-time monitor expressiveness. As a preliminary demonstration of this model's applicability for these tasks, the paper sketches a correctness result for a simple program instrumentation scheme.

Language-based approaches to information security have led to the development of security type systems that permit the programmer to describe confidentiality policies on data. Security type systems are usually intended to enforce noninterference, a property that requires that high-security information not affect low-security computation. However, in practice, noninterference is often too restrictive—the desired policy does permit some information leakage.To compensate for the strictness of noninterference, practical approaches include some mechanism for declassifying high-security information. But such declassification is potentially dangerous, and its use should be restricted to prevent unintended information leaks. Zdancewic and Myers previously introduced the notion of robust declassification in an attempt to capture the desired restrictions on declassification, but that work did not propose a method for determining when a program satisfies the robust declassification condition.This paper motivates robust declassification and shows that a simple change to a security type system can enforce it. The idea is to extend the lattice of security labels to include integrity constraints as well as confidentiality constraints and then require that the decision to perform a declassification have high integrity.

Security-typed languages enforce secrecy or integrity policies by type-checking. This paper investigates continuation-passing style (CPS) as a means of proving that such languages enforce noninterference and as a first step towards understanding their compilation. We present a low-level, secure calculus with higher-order, imperative features and linear continuations. Linear continuations impose a stack discipline on the control flow of programs. This additional structure in the type system lets us establish a strong information-flow security property called noninterference. We prove that our CPS target language enjoys the noninterference property and we show how to translate secure high-level programs to this low-level language. This noninterference proof is the first of its kind for a language with higher-order functions and state.

Lack of memory safety in C is the root cause of a multitude of serious bugs and security vulnerabilities. Numerous software-only and hardware-based schemes have been proposed to enforce memory safety. Among these approaches, pointer-based checking, which maintains per-pointer metadata in a disjoint metadata space, has been recognized as providing comprehensive memory safety. Software approaches for pointer-based checking have high performance overheads. In contrast, hardware approaches introduce a myriad of hardware structures and widgets to mitigate those performance overheads.This paper proposes WatchdogLite, an ISA extension that provides hardware acceleration for a compiler implementation of pointer-based checking. This division of labor between the compiler and the hardware allows for hardware acceleration while using only preexisting architectural registers. By leveraging the compiler to identify pointers, perform check elimination, and insert the new instructions, this approach attains performance similar to prior hardware-intensive approaches without adding any hardware structures for tracking metadata.

In this paper we use finite vector spaces (finite dimension, over finite fields) as a non-standard computational model of linear logic. We first define a simple, finite PCF-like lambda-calculus with booleans, and then we discuss two finite models, one based on finite sets and the other on finite vector spaces. The first model is shown to be fully complete with respect to the operational semantics of the language. The second model is not complete, but we develop an algebraic extension of the finite lambda calculus that recovers completeness. The relationship between the two semantics is described, and several examples based on Church numerals are presented.

The Oregon Programming Languages Summer School (OPLSS) has been held at the University of Oregon each summer since 2002. We believe it has been an unqualified success in providing students and instructors a unique opportunity to study relevant background and cutting-edge results in the field of programming languages research. As the current steering committee and organizers for OPLSS, we appreciate the opportunity to provide an overview of the summer school. This short article describes the format, history, goals, and support for the OPLSS.

The C++ programming language remains widely used, despite inheriting many unsafe features from C---features that often lead to failures of type or memory safety that manifest as buffer overflows, use-after-free vulnerabilities, or abstraction violations. Malicious attackers can exploit such violations to compromise application and system security. This paper introduces Ironclad C++, an approach to bringing the benefits of type and memory safety to C++. Ironclad C++ is, in essence, a library-augmented, type-safe subset of C++. All Ironclad C++ programs are valid C++ programs that can be compiled using standard, off-the-shelf C++ compilers. However, not all valid C++ programs are valid Ironclad C++ programs: a syntactic source-code validator statically prevents the use of unsafe C++ features. To enforce safety properties that are difficult to check statically, Ironclad C++ applies dynamic checks via templated ``smart pointer'' classes. Using a semi-automatic refactoring tool, we have ported nearly 50K lines of code to Ironclad C++. These benchmarks incur a performance overhead of 12% on average, compared to the original unsafe C++ code.

Modern compilers, such as LLVM and GCC, use a static single assignment(SSA) intermediate representation (IR) to simplify and enable many advanced optimizations. However, formally verifying the correctness of SSA-based optimizations is challenging because SSA properties depend on a function's entire control-flow graph.This paper addresses this challenge by developing a proof technique for proving SSA-based program invariants and compiler optimizations. We use this technique in the Coq proof assistant to create mechanized correctness proofs of several "micro" transformations that form the building blocks for larger SSA optimizations. To demonstrate the utility of this approach, we formally verify a variant of LLVM's mem2reg transformation in Vellvm, a Coq-based formal semantics of the LLVM IR. The extracted implementation generates code with performance comparable to that of LLVM's unverified implementation.

Software developers often structure programs in such a way that different pieces of code constitute distinct principals . Types help define the protocol by which these principals interact. In particular, abstract types allow a principal to make strong assumptions about how well-typed clients use the facilities that it provides. We show how the notions of principals and type abstraction can be formalized within a language. Different principals can know the implementation of different abstract types. We use additional syntax to track the flow of values with abstract types during the evaluation of a program and demonstrate how this framework supports syntactic proofs (in the sytle of subject reduction) for type-abstraction properties. Such properties have traditionally required semantic arguments; using syntax aboids the need to build a model and recursive typesfor the language. We present various typed lambda calculi with principals, including versions that have mutable state and recursive types.

In this paper we study the problem of interoperability --- combining constructs from two separate programming languages within one program --- in the case where one of the two languages is dependently typed and the other is simply typed.We present a core calculus called SD, which combines dependently- and simply-typed sub-languages and supports user-defined (dependent) datatypes, among other standard features. SD has "boundary terms" that mediate the interaction between the two sub-languages. The operational semantics of SD demonstrates how the necessary dynamic checks, which must be done when passing a value from the simply-typed world to the dependently typed world, can be extracted from the dependent type constructors themselves, modulo user-defined functions for marshaling values across the boundary.We establish type-safety and other meta-theoretic properties of SD, and contrast this approach to others in the literature.

One prerequisite to the formal verification of modern compilers is to formalize computing dominators, which enable SSA forms, advanced optimizations, and analysis. This paper provides an abstract specification of dominance analysis that is sufficient for formalizing modern compilers; it describes a certified implementation and instance of the specification that is simple to design and reason about, and also reasonably efficient. The paper also presents applications of dominance analysis: an SSA-form type checker, verifying SSA-based optimizations, and constructing dominator trees. This development is a part of the Vellvm project. All proofs and implementation have been carried out in Coq.

Modular languages support generative type abstraction, ensuring that an abstract type is distinct from its representation, except inside the implementation where the two are synonymous. We show that this well-established feature is in tension with the non-parametric features of newer type systems, such as indexed type families and GADTs. In this paper we solve the problem by using kinds to distinguish between parametric and non-parametric contexts. The result is directly applicable to Haskell, which is rapidly developing support for type-level computation, but the same issues should arise whenever generativity and non-parametric features are combined.

We present System F°, an extension of System F that uses kinds to distinguish between linear and unrestricted types, simplifying the use of linearity for general-purpose programming. We demonstrate through examples how System F° can elegantly express many useful protocols, and we prove that any protocol representable as a DFA can be encoded as an F° type. We supply mechanized proofs of System F°'s soundness and parametricity properties, along with a nonstandard operational semantics that formalizes common intuitions about linearity and aids in reasoning about protocols.We compare System F° to other linear systems, noting that the simplicity of our kind-based approach leads to a more explicit account of what linearity is meant to capture, allowing otherwise-conflicting interpretations of linearity (in particular, restrictions on aliasing versus restrictions on resource usage) to coexist peacefully. We also discuss extensions to System F^o aimed at making the core language more practical, including the additive fragment of linear logic, algebraic datatypes, and recursion.

This paper presents a novel syntactic logical relation for a polymorphic linear λ-calculus that treats all types as linear and introduces the constructor ! to account for intuitionistic terms, and System F°--an extension of System F that uses kinds to distinguish linear from intuitionistic types. We define a logical relation for open values under both open linear and intuitionistic contexts, then extend it for open terms with evaluation and open relation substitutions. Relations that instantiate type quantifiers are for open terms and types. We demonstrate the applicability of this logical relation through its soundness with respect to contextual equivalence, along with free theorems for linearity that are difficult to achieve by closed logical relations. When interpreting types on only closed terms, the model defaults to a closed logical relation that is both sound and complete with respect to contextual equivalence and is sufficient to reason about isomorphisms of type encodings. All of our results have been mechanically verified in Coq.

Many programs operate reactively--patiently waiting for user input, running for a while producing output, and eventually returning to a state where they are ready to accept another input (or occasionally diverging). When a reactive program communicates with multiple parties, we would like to be sure that it can be given secret information by one without leaking it to others.Motivated by web browsers and client-side web applications, we explore definitions of noninterference for reactive programs and identify two of special interest--one corresponding to termination-insensitive noninterference for a simple sequential language, the other to termination-sensitive noninterference. We focus on the former and develop a proof technique for showing that program behaviors are secure according to this definition. To demonstrate the viability of the approach, we define a simple reactive language with an information-flow type system and apply our proof technique to show that well-typed programs are secure.

Access control and privacy policy relations tend to focus on decision outcomes and are very sensitive to defined terms and state. Small changes or updates to a policy language or vocabulary may make two similar policies incomparable. To address this we develop two flexible policy relations derived from bisimulation in process calculi. Strong licensing compares the outcome of two policies strictly, similar to strong bisimulation. Weak licensing compares the outcome of policies more flexibly by ignoring irrelevant (non-conflicting)differences between outcomes, similar to weak bisimulation. We illustrate the relations using examples from P3P.

Security views are a flexible and effective mechanism for controlling access to confidential information. Rather than allowing untrusted users to access source data directly, they are instead provided with are restricted view, from which all confidential information has been removed. The program that generates the view effectively embodies a confidentiality policy for the underlying source data. However, this approach has a significant drawback: it prevents users from updating the data in the view.To address the "view update problem" in general, a number of bidirectional languages have been proposed. Programs in these languages---often called lenses---can be run in two directions: read from left to right, they map sources to views; from right to left,they map updated views back to updated sources. However, existing bidirectional languages do not deal adequately with security. In particular, they do not provide a way to ensure the integrity of source data as it is manipulated by untrusted users of the view.We propose a novel framework of secure lenses that addresses these shortcomings. We enrich the types of basic lenses with equivalence relations capturing notions of confidentiality and integrity, and formulate the essential security conditions as non-interference properties. We then instantiate this framework in the domain of string transformations, developing syntax for bidirectional string combinators with security-annotated regular expressions as their types.

Authorization logics provide a principled and flexible approach to specifying access control policies. One of their compelling benefits is that a proof in the logic is evidence that an access-control decision has been made in accordance with policy. Using such proofs for auditing reduces the trusted computing base and enables the ability to detect flaws in complex authorization policies. Moreover, the proof structure is itself useful, because proof normalization can yield information about the relevance of policy statements. Untrusted, but well-typed, applications that access resources through an appropriate interface must obey the access control policy and create proofs useful for audit. This paper presents AURA_0, an authorization logic based on a dependently-typed variant of DCC and proves the metatheoretic properties of subject-reduction and normalization. It shows the utility of proof-based auditing in a number of examples and discusses several pragmatic issues that must be addressed in this context.

How close are we to a world in which mechanically verified software is commonplace? A world in which theorem proving technology is used routinely by both software developers and programming language researchers alike? One crucial step towards achieving these goals is mechanized reasoning about language metatheory. The time has come to bring together the theorem proving and programming language communities to address this problem. We have proposed the POPLMark challenge as a concrete set of benchmarks intended both for measuring progress in this area and for stimulating discussion and collaboration. Our goal is to push the boundaries of existing technology to the point where we can achieve mechanized metatheory for the masses.

This paper describes the design and implementation of ABASH, a tool for statically analyzing programs written in the bash scripting language. Although it makes no formal guarantees against missed errors or spurious warnings (largely due to the highly dynamic nature of bash scripts), ABASHis useful for detecting certain common program errors that may lead to security vulnerabilities. In experiments with 49 bash scripts taken from popular Internet repositories, ABASH was able to identify 20 of them as containing bugs of varying severity while yielding only a reasonable number of spurious warnings on both these scripts and the generally bug-free initialization scripts of the Ubuntu Linux distribution. ABASH works by performing abstract interpretation of a bash script via an abstract semantics that accounts for shell variable expansion. The analysis is also parameterized by a collection of signatures that describe external program interfaces (for Unix commands, etc.), yielding an easily configurable and extensible framework for finding bugs in bash scripts

This paper proposes to combine two seemingly opposed programming models for building massively concurrent network services: the event-driven model and the multithreaded model. The result is a hybrid design that offers the best of both worlds--the ease of use and expressiveness of threads and the flexibility and performance of events.This paper shows how the hybrid model can be implemented entirely at the application level using concurrency monads in Haskell, which provides type-safe abstractions for both events and threads. This approach simplifies the development of massively concurrent software in a way that scales to real-world network services. The Haskell implementation supports exceptions, symmetrical multiprocessing, software transactional memory, asynchronous I/O mechanisms and application-level network protocol stacks. Experimental results demonstrate that this monad-based approach has good performance: the threads are extremely lightweight (scaling to ten million threads), and the I/O performance compares favorably to that of Linux NPTL. tens of thousands of simultaneous, mostly-idle client connections. Such massively-concurrent programs are difficult to implement, especially when other requirements, such as high performance and strong security, must also be met.

Information-flow security policies are an appealing way of specifying confidentiality and integrity policies in information systems. Most previous work on language-based security has assumed that programs run in a closed, managed environment and that they use potentially unsafe constructs, such as declassification, to interface to external communication channels, perhaps after encrypting data to preserve its confidentiality. This situation is unsatisfactory for systems that need to communicate over untrusted channels or use untrusted persistent storage, since the connection between the cryptographic mechanisms used in the untrusted environment and the abstract security labels used in the trusted language environment is ad hoc and unclear. This paper addresses this problem in three ways: first, it presents a simple, security-typed language with a novel mechanism called packages that provides an abstract means for creating opaque objects and associating them with security labels; well-typed programs in this language enforce noninterference. Second, it shows how to implement these packages using public-key cryptography. This implementation strategy uses a variant of Myers and Liskov's decentralized label model, which supports a rich label structure in which mutually distrusting data owners can specify independent confidentiality and integrity requirements. Third, it demonstrates that this implementation of packages is sound with respect to Dolev-Yao style attackers-such an attacker cannot determine the contents of a package without possessing the appropriate keys, as determined by the security label on the package.

Security-oriented languages are a key ingredient to the design of secure software systems. The provide specific functionality, such as mechanisms for authorization, auditing, confidentiality, and the tracking of information-flow throughout the system. Programs written in these languages that take advantage of these features, can be automatically shown to possesses key properties, essential to the security of the entire system. However, these results critically rely on the metatheoretic properties of the languages themselves. This project has demonstrated both that it is feasible to mechanically check these properties, and that the overheads of the engineering process of producing mechanically verified languages are reasonable.

This paper presents Rx, a new security-typed programming language with features intended to make the management of information-flow policies more practical. Security labels in Rx, in contrast to prior approaches, are defined in terms of owned roles, as found in the RT role-based trust-management framework. Role-based security policies allow flexible delegation, and our language Rx provides constructs through which programs can robustly update policies and react to policy updates dynamically. Our dynamic semantics use statically verified transactions to eliminate illegal information flows across updates, which we call transitive flows. Because policy updates can be observed through dynamic queries, policy updates can potentially reveal sensitive information. As such, Rx considers policy statements themselves to be potentially confidential information and subject to information-flow metapolicies.

This paper presents an embedded security sublanguage for enforcing information-flow policies in the standard Haskell programming language. The sublanguage provides useful information-flow control mechanisms including dynamic security lattices, run-time code privileges and declassification, without modifying the base language. This design avoids the redundant work of producing new languages, lowers the threshold for adopting security-typed languages, and also provides great flexibility and modularity for using security-policy frameworks. The embedded security sublanguage is designed using a standard combinator interface called arrows. Computations constructed in the sublanguage have static and explicit control-flow components, making it possible to implement information-flow control using static-analysis techniques at run time, while providing strong security guarantees. This paper presents a concrete Haskell implementation and an example application demonstrating the proposed techniques.