Abstract
Bytecodes and virtual machines (VM) are prevailing programming facilities in contemporary software industry due to their ease of portability across various platforms. Thus, it is critical to improve their trustworthiness. This paper addresses the interesting and challenging problem of certifying bytecode programs over certified VMs. Our solutions to this problem include: 1) A logical systems (CBP) for a bytecode machine is built to modularly certify bytecode programs with abstract control stacks and unstructured control flows, 2) and the corresponding stack-based virtual machine is implemented and certified, 3) a simulation relation between bytecode program and VM implementation is developed and proved to achieve the objective that once some safety property of a bytecode program is certified in CBP system, the property will be preserved on any certified VM. We prove the soundness and demonstrate its power by certifying some example programs with the Coq proof assistant. This work not only provides a solid theoretical foundation for reasoning about bytecode programs, but also gains insight into building proof-preserving compilers.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Appel, A.W.: Foundational proof-carrying code. In: Proc. 16th IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science, pp. 247–258. IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos (2001)
Bannwart, F., Müller, P.: A program logic for bytecode. In: Proceedings of Bytecode?5. Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science, pp. 255–273. Elsevier, Amsterdam (2005)
Barthe, G., Grégoire, B., Kunz, C., Rezk, T.: Certificate translation for optimizing compilers. ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems 31(5), 18:1–18:45 (2009)
Benton, N.: A typed, compositional logic for a stack-based abstract machine. In: Yi, K. (ed.) APLAS 2005. LNCS, vol. 3780, pp. 364–380. Springer, Heidelberg (2005)
Chen, J., Hawblitzel, C., Perry, F., Emmi, M., Condit, J., Coetzee, D., Pratikaki, P.: Type-preserving compilation for large-scale optimizing object-oriented compilers. In: Prog. Lang. Design and Impl (PLDI 2008), pp. 183–192. ACM, New York (2008)
Chlipala, A.: A certified type-preserving compiler from lambda calculus to assembly language. In: Prog. Lang. Design and Impl (PLDI 2007), pp. 54–65. ACM, New York (2007)
Coq Development Team. The Coq proof assistant reference manual. Version 8.2 (2008)
ECMA. Standard ECMA-335 Common Language Infrastructure (2006)
Feng, X., Ni, Z., Shao, Z., Guo, Y.: An open framework for foundational proof-carrying code. In: Proc. 2007 Workshop on Types in Lang. Design and Impl., pp. 67–78 (2007)
Feng, X., Shao, Z., Vaynberg, A., Xiang, S., Ni, Z.: Modular verification of assembly code with stack-based control abstractions. In: Prog. Lang. Design and Impl (PLDI 2006), pp. 401–414. ACM Press, New York (2006)
Hoare, C.A.R.: An axiomatic basis for computer programming. Communications of the ACM 26(1), 53–56 (1969)
Lawton, K., Denney, B., Guarneri, N.D., Ruppert, V., Bothamy, C.: Bochs user manual (2008), http://bochs.sourceforge.net/
League, C., Shao, Z., Trifonov, V.: Precision in practice: A type-preserving java compiler. In: Hedin, G. (ed.) CC 2003. LNCS, vol. 2622, pp. 106–120. Springer, Heidelberg (2003)
Leinenbach, D., Paul, W., Petrova, E.: Towards the formal verification of a c0 compiler: Code generation and implementation correctnes. In: SEFM 2005: Proceedings of the Third IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering and Formal Methods, Washington, DC, USA, pp. 2–12. IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos (2005)
Leroy, X.: A formally verified compiler back-end. Draft (2008), http://pauillac.inria.fr/~leroy/publi/compcert-backend.pdf
Lindholm, T., Yellin, F.: The java virtual machine specification, 2nd edn. (1999)
Ni, Z., Shao, Z.: Certified assembly programming with embedded code pointers. In: POPL 2006, pp. 320–333 (2006)
Quigley, C.L.: A programming logic for java bytecode programs. In: Proc. of 16th Int. Conf. on Theorem Proving in Higher-Order Logics, pp. 41–54. Springer, Heidelberg (2003)
Saabas, A., Uustalu, T.: Compositional type systems for stack-based low-level languages. In: Proc. of 12th Computing, Australasian Theory Symp., Australian, pp. 27–39 (2006)
Sun Microsystem. Top25 bugs (2009), http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/top25_bugs.do/
Tan, G., Appel, A.W.: A compositional logic for control flow. In: Emerson, E.A., Namjoshi, K.S. (eds.) VMCAI 2006. LNCS, vol. 3855, pp. 80–94. Springer, Heidelberg (2006)
Vanderwaart, J.C., Crary, K.: A typed interface for garbage collection. In: Types in Lang. Design and Impl (TLDI 2003), pp. 109–122 (2003)
Weiss, M., de Ferrire, F., Delsart, B., Fabre, C., Hirsch, F., Johnson, E.A., Joloboff, V., Roy, F., Siebert, F., Spengler, X.: Turboj, a java bytecode-to-native compiler. In: Müller, F., Bestavros, A. (eds.) LCTES 1998. LNCS, vol. 1474, pp. 119–130. Springer, Heidelberg (1998)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Dong, Y., Ren, K., Wang, S., Zhang, S. (2009). Certify Once, Trust Anywhere: Modular Certification of Bytecode Programs for Certified Virtual Machine. In: Hu, Z. (eds) Programming Languages and Systems. APLAS 2009. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5904. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-10672-9_20
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-10672-9_20
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-10671-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-10672-9
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)