Traditionally, software is produced in this way: write some code, maybe do some code review, run unit-tests, and then hope it is correct. Hard experience shows that it is very hard for programmers to write bug-free software. These bugs are sometimes caught in manual testing, but many bugs still are exposed to users, and then must be fixed in patches or subsequent versions. This works for most software, but it’s not a great way to write cryptographic software; users expect and deserve assurances that the code providing security and privacy is well written and bug free.

Even innocuous looking bugs in cryptographic primitives can break the security properties of the overall system and threaten user security. Unfortunately, such bugs aren’t uncommon. In just the last year, popular cryptographic libraries have issued dozens of CVEs for bugs in their core cryptographic primitives or for incorrect use of those primitives. These bugs include many memory safety errors, some side-channels leaks, and a few correctness errors, for example, in bignum arithmetic computations… So what can we do?

Fortunately, recent advances in formal verification allow us to significantly improve the situation by building high assurance implementations of cryptographic algorithms. These implementations are still written by hand, but they can be automatically analyzed at compile time to ensure that they are free of broad classes of bugs. The result is that we can have much higher confidence that our implementation is correct and that it respects secure programming rules that would usually be very difficult to enforce by hand.

This is a very exciting development and Mozilla has partnered with INRIA and Project Everest (Microsoft Research, CMU, INRIA) to bring components from their formally verified HACL* cryptographic library into NSS, the security engine which powers Firefox. We believe that we are the first major Web browser to have formally verified cryptographic primitives.

The first result of this collaboration, an implementation of the Curve25519 key establishment algorithm (RFC7748), has just landed in Firefox Nightly. Curve25519 is widely used for key-exchange in TLS, and was recently standardized by the IETF. As an additional bonus, besides being formally verified, the HACL* Curve25519 implementation is also almost 20% faster on 64 bit platforms than the existing NSS implementation (19500 scalar multiplications per second instead of 15100) which represents an improvement in both security and performance to our users. We expect to ship this new code as part as our November Firefox 57 release.

Over the next few months, we will be working to incorporate other HACL* algorithms into NSS, and will also have more to say about the details of how the HACL* verification works and how it gets integrated into NSS.

– Benjamin Beurdouche, Franziskus Kiefer & Tim Taubert