Compiling c programs into a strongly typed assembly language

Authors:
Takahiro Kosakai;Toshiyuki Maeda;Akinori Yonezawa
Affiliations:
Department of Computer Science, Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan;Department of Computer Science, Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan;Department of Computer Science, Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan
Venue:
ASIAN'07 Proceedings of the 12th Asian computing science conference on Advances in computer science: computer and network security
Year:
2007

Citing 12
Cited 2

The C programming language

The C programming language
Once upon a type

FPCA '95 Proceedings of the seventh international conference on Functional programming languages and computer architecture
From system F to typed assembly language

POPL '98 Proceedings of the 25th ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages
A dependently typed assembly language

Proceedings of the sixth ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Functional programming
Cyclone: A Safe Dialect of C

ATEC '02 Proceedings of the General Track of the annual conference on USENIX Annual Technical Conference
Stack-Based Typed Assembly Language

TIC '98 Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Types in Compilation
Alias Types for Recursive Data Structures

TIC '00 Selected papers from the Third International Workshop on Types in Compilation
CCured: type-safe retrofitting of legacy software

ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS)
SafeDrive: safe and recoverable extensions using language-based techniques

OSDI '06 Proceedings of the 7th symposium on Operating systems design and implementation
Dependent types for low-level programming

ESOP'07 Proceedings of the 16th European conference on Programming
Fail-safe ANSI-C compiler: an approach to making C programs secure

ISSS'02 Proceedings of the 2002 Mext-NSF-JSPS international conference on Software security: theories and systems
Using dependent types to certify the safety of assembly code

SAS'05 Proceedings of the 12th international conference on Static Analysis

Writing an OS Kernel in a Strictly and Statically Typed Language

Formal to Practical Security
Application of static analyses for state-space reduction to the microcontroller binary code

Science of Computer Programming

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.00

Visualization

Abstract

C is one of the most popular languages in system programming, though its unsafe nature often causes security vulnerabilities. In the face of this situation, many tools are developed to ensure safety properties of C programs. However, most of them work at the source code level, and conventional compilers lose safety guarantee as they translate source code into assembly code. In this paper, we present CTAL0, a strongly typed assembly language that is aimed at certifying the memory safety of assembly code compiled from C programs. CTAL0 is expressive enough to implement potentially unsafe ANSI C features including pointer arithmetics and casts. We have also implemented a type-checker and an experimental C compiler that produces safe CTAL0 assembly code by performing several transformations on given programs to avoid dangerous operations.