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Certifying assembly programs with trails

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Abstract

In this paper, we introduce a new way of certifying assembly programs. Unlike previous program logics, we extract the control-flow information from the code and generate an intermediate trail between the specification and the real code. Trails are auxiliary specifications and treated as modules in the certification process. We define a simple modular program logic called trail-based certified assembly programming (TCAP) to certify and link different parts of a program using the corresponding trails. Because the control flow information in trails is explicit, the rules are easier to design. We show that our logic is powerful enough to prove partial correctness of assembly programs with features including stack-based abstractions and self-modifying code.We also provide a semantics for TCAP and prove that the logic is sound with respect to the semantics.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science & Technology, University of Science & Technology of China, Hefei, 230027, China

    Wei Wang

  2. Suzhou Institute for Advanced Study, University of Science & Technology of China, Suzhou, 215123, China

    Wei Wang

Authors
  1. Wei Wang
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Correspondence to Wei Wang.

Additional information

Wei Wang is a fourth-year PhD student in the department of computer science at the University of Science and Technology of China, supervised by Prof. Yiyun Chen. His research interests include programming languages and formal methods. In particular, Wei is interested in developing theories, programming languages, and tools to build formally certified assembly programs, with rigorous safety and correctness guarantees.

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Wang, W. Certifying assembly programs with trails. Front. Comput. Sci. China 5, 472–485 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11704-011-0166-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11704-011-0166-z

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