The Last Mile: High-Assurance and High-Speed Cryptographic Implementations
This addresses the need for secure and fast cryptographic software in critical systems like TLS 1.3, representing a novel integration rather than an incremental improvement.
The paper tackles the problem of building cryptographic implementations that are both provably correct and highly efficient, delivering formally verified vectorized implementations of ChaCha20-Poly1305 that outperform the fastest non-verified code.
We develop a new approach for building cryptographic implementations. Our approach goes the last mile and delivers assembly code that is provably functionally correct, protected against side-channels, and as efficient as hand-written assembly. We illustrate ur approach using ChaCha20-Poly1305, one of the mandatory ciphersuites in TLS 1.3, and deliver formally verified vectorized implementations which outperform the fastest non-verified code. We realize our approach by combining the Jasmin framework, which offers in a single language features of high-level and low-level programming, and the EasyCrypt proof assistant, which offers a versatile verification infrastructure that supports proofs of functional correctness and equivalence checking. Neither of these tools had been used for functional correctness before. Taken together, these infrastructures empower programmers to develop efficient and verified implementations by "game hopping", starting from reference implementations that are proved functionally correct against a specification, and gradually introducing program optimizations that are proved correct by equivalence checking. We also make several contributions of independent interest, including a new and extensible verified compiler for Jasmin, with a richer memory model and support for vectorized instructions, and a new embedding of Jasmin in EasyCrypt.