Modular verification of assembly code with stack-based control abstractions

  • Authors:

  • Xinyu Feng;Zhong Shao;Alexander Vaynberg;Sen Xiang;Zhaozhong Ni

  • Affiliations:

  • Yale University, New Haven, CT , U.S.A.;Yale University, New Haven, CT , U.S.A.;Yale University, New Haven, CT , U.S.A.;University of Science and Technology of China, Anhui, China;Yale University, New Haven, CT

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2006 ACM SIGPLAN conference on Programming language design and implementation
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

Runtime stacks are critical components of any modern software--they are used to implement powerful control structures such as function call/return, stack cutting and unwinding, coroutines, and thread context switch. Stack operations, however, are very hard to reason about: there are no known formal specifications for certifying C-style setjmp/longjmp, stack cutting and unwinding, or weak continuations (in C--). In many proof-carrying code (PCC) systems, return code pointers and exception handlers are treated as general first-class functions (as in continuation-passing style) even though both should have more limited scopes.In this paper we show that stack-based control abstractions follow a much simpler pattern than general first-class code pointers. We present a simple but flexible Hoare-style framework for modular verification of assembly code with all kinds of stackbased control abstractions, including function call/return, tail call, setjmp/longjmp, weak continuation, stack cutting, stack unwinding, multi-return function call, coroutines, and thread context switch. Instead of presenting a specific logic for each control structure, we develop all reasoning systems as instances of a generic framework. This allows program modules and their proofs developed in different PCC systems to be linked together. Our system is fully mechanized. We give the complete soundness proof and a full verification of several examples in the Coq proof assistant.