A Framework for Certified Program Analysis and Its Applications to Mobile-Code Safety

Bor-Yuh Evan Chang, Adam Chlipala, George C. Necula. A Framework for Certified Program Analysis and Its Applications to Mobile-Code Safety. Technical Report UCB/ERL M05/32. UC Berkeley EECS Department. 2005.

A certified program analysis is an analysis whose implementation is accompanied by a checkable proof of soundness. We present a framework whose purpose is to simplify the development of certified program analyses without compromising the run-time efficiency of the analyses. At the core of the framework is a novel technique for automatically extracting Coq proof-assistant specifications from ML implementations of program analyses, while preserving to a large extent the structure of the implementation.

We show that this framework allows developers of mobile code to provide to the code receivers untrusted code verifiers in the form of certified program analyses. We demonstrate efficient implementations in this framework of bytecode verification, typed assembly language, and proof-carrying code.

This is an extended version of our VMCAI'06 paper, containing a formalization of our model extraction procedure and additional examples.


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