Region-based memory management is an alternative to standard tracing garbage collection that makes potentially dangerous operations such as memory deallocation explicit but verifiably safe. In this article, we present a new compiler intermediate language, called the Capability Calculus, that supports region-based memory management and enjoys a provably safe type system. Unlike previous region-based type systems, region lifetimes need not be lexically scoped and yet the language may be checked for safety without complex analyses. Therefore, our type system may be deployed in settings such as extensible operating systems where both the performance and safety of untrusted code is important.

Linear type systems allow destructive operations such as object deallocation and imperative updates of functional data structures. These operations and others, such as the ability to reuse memory at di#erent types, are essential in low-level typed languages. However, traditional linear type systems are too restrictive for use in low-level code where it is necessary to exploit pointer aliasing. We present a new typed language that allows functions to specify the shape of the store that they expect and to track the flow of pointers through a computation. Our type system is expressive enough to represent pointer aliasing and yet safely permit destructive operations.

Security remains a major roadblock to universal acceptance of the Web for many kinds of transactions, especially since the recent sharp increase in remotely exploitable vulnerabilities has been attributed to Web application bugs. Many verification tools are discovering previously unknown vulnerabilities in legacy C programs, raising hopes that the same success can be achieved with Web applications. In this paper, we describe a sound and holistic approach to ensuring Web application security. Viewing Web application vulnerabilities as a secure information flow problem, we created a lattice-based static analysis algorithm derived from type systems and typestate, and addressed its soundness. During the analysis, sections of code considered vulnerable are instrumented with runtime guards, thus securing Web applications in the absence of user intervention. With sufficient annotations, runtime overhead can be reduced to zero. We also created a tool named WebSSARI (Web application Security by Static Analysis and Runtime Inspection) to test our algorithm, and used it to verify 230 open-source Web application projects on SourceForge.net, which were selected to represent projects of different maturity, popularity, and scale. 69 contained vulnerabilities and their developers were notified. 38 projects acknowledged our findings and stated their plans to provide patches. Our statistics also show that static analysis reduced potential runtime overhead by 98.4%. Categories and Subject Descriptors D.2.4 [Software Engineering]: Software / Program Verification – class invariants, formal methods; D.4.6 [Operating Systems]: Security and Protection – information flow controls, correctness proofs, formal methods; K.6.5 [Computing Milieux]: Security and Protection – invasive software, unauthorized access.

While a typical software component has a clearly specified (static) interface in terms of the methods and the input/output types they support, information about the correct sequencing of method calls the client must invoke is usually undocumented. In this paper, we propose a novel solution for automatically extracting such temporal specifications for Java classes. Given a Java class, and a safety property such as “the exception E should not be raised”, the corresponding (dynamic) interface is the most general way of invoking the methods in the class so that the safety property is not violated. Our synthesis method first constructs a symbolic representation of the finite state-transition system obtained from the class using predicate abstraction. Constructing the interface then corresponds to solving a partial-information two-player game on this symbolic graph. We present a sound approach to solve this computationally-hard problem approximately using algorithms for learning finite automata and symbolic model checking for branching-time logics. We describe an implementation of the proposed techniques in the tool JIST — Java Interface Synthesis Tool—and demonstrate that the tool can construct interfaces accurately and efficiently for sample Java2SDK library classes.

A certified binary is a value together with a proof that the value satisfies a given specification. Existing compilers that generate certified code have focused on simple memory and control-flow safety rather than more advanced properties. In this paper, we present a general framework for explicitly representing complex propositions and proofs in typed intermediate and assembly languages. The new framework allows us to reason about certified programs that involve effects while still maintaining decidable typechecking. We show how to integrate an entire proof system (the calculus of inductive constructions) into a compiler intermediate language and how the intermediate language can undergo complex transformations (CPS and closure conversion) while preserving proofs represented in the type system. Our work provides a foundation for the process of automatically generating certified binaries in a type-theoretic framework. 1

We propose an automatic method to enforce trace properties on programs. The programmer specifies the property separately from the program; a program transformer takes the program and the property and automatically produces another "equivalent" program satisfying the property. This separation of concerns makes the program easier to develop and maintain. Our approach is both static and dynamic. It integrates static analyses in order to avoid useless transformations. On the other hand, it never rejects programs but adds dynamic checks when necessary. An important challenge is to make this dynamic enforcement as inexpensive as possible. The most obvious application domain is the enforcement of security policies. In particular, a potential use of the method is the securization of mobile code upon receipt.

Bytecode verification is a crucial security component for Java applets, on the Web and on embedded devices such as smart cards. This paper reviews the various bytecode verification algorithms that have been proposed, recasts them in a common framework of dataflow analysis, and surveys the use of proof assistants to specify bytecode verification and prove its correctness.

... This paper develops type systems which can statically guarantee the success of these checks. Our systems allow security properties of programs to be clearly expressed within the types themselves, which thus serve as static declarations of the security policy. We develop these systems using a systematic methodology: we show that the security-passing style translation, proposed by Wallach, Appel and Felten as a dynamic implementation technique, also gives rise to static security-aware type systems, by composition with conventional type systems. To de ne the latter, we use the general HM(X) framework, and easily construct several constraint- and unification-based type systems.

Machine We have described the type constructor language of CL and the typing rules for the main term-level constructs. In fact, the previous section contains all of the ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems, Vol. TBD, No. TDB, Month Year. 20 D. Walker, K. Crary, and G. Morrisett #; #;# # h at r : # # # # f : Type #; ## # ; #{f :# f , x 1 :# 1 , . . . , xn :# n}; C # e # # f = #[# # ].(C, # 1 , . . . , #n ) # 0 at r f, x 1 , . . . , xn ## Dom(#) # #; #;# # fix f[# # ](C, x 1 :# 1 , . . . , xn :# n ).e at r : # f (h-fix) #; #;# # v i : # i (for 1 # i # n) # # r : Rgn #; #;# # #v 1 , . . . , vn # at r : ## 1 , . . . , #n # at r (h-tuple) #; #;# # h at r : # # # # # # = # : Type #; #;# # h at r : # (h-eq) #; #;# # v : # #; #;# # x : # (#(x) = #) (v-var) #; #;# # i : int (v-int) #; #;# # v : #[#:#, # # ].(C, # 1 , . . . , #n ) # 0 at r # # c : # #; #;# # v[c] : (#[# # ].(C, # 1 , . . . , #n ) # 0)[c/#] at r (v-type) #; #;# # v : #[# # C ## , # # ].(C # , # 1 , . . . , #n ) # 0 at r # # C # C ## #; #;# # v[C] : (#[# # ].(C # , # 1 , . . . , #n ) # 0)[C/#] at r (v-sub) #; #;# # v : # # # # # # = # : Type #; #;# # v : # (v-eq) Fig. 6. Capability static semantics: Heap and word values. information programmers or compilers require to write type-safe programs in CL. However, in order to prove a type soundness result in the style of Wright and Felleisen [Wright and Felleisen 1994], we must be able to type check programs at every step during their evaluation. In this section, we give the static semantics of the run-time values that are not normally manipulated by programmers, but are nevertheless necessary to prove our soundness result. At first, the formal definition ...

Bytecode verification is a crucial security component for Java applets, on the Web and on embedded devices such as smart cards. This paper describes the main bytecode verification algorithms and surveys the variety of formal methods that have been applied to bytecode verification in order to establish its correctness.