The work we do these days on F* is often in service of Project Everest. The goal of Everest is to verify and deploy a drop-in replacement for the HTTPS stack, the protocol using which you are probably reading this page, securely (hopefully). So far, we’ve been focusing most of our efforts in Everest on TLS, the protocol at the heart of HTTPS.

Right now, I’m stuck in the Eurostar back from our week-long meeting in Cambridge, UK, so it feels like a good time to write down some thoughts about KreMLin, a new compiler backend that we’re using in Everest, that several of us have been working on over the summer, at MSR and INRIA.

As a reminder, Everest sets out to verify and deploy secure cryptographic protocols, starting with TLS 1.3. Deploy is the salient part: in order to see people adopt our code, we not only need to write and prove our TLS library, but also to

make sure it delivers a level of performance acceptable for browser vendors, and

package it in a form that’s palatable for a hardcode Windows developer that started writing C before I was born.

A TLS library can, roughly speaking, be broken down into two parts: the protocol layer that performs the handshake (“libssl”) and the cryptographic layer that actually encrypts the data to be transmitted (“libcrypto”). The handshake connects to the server, says hi, agrees on which algorithms to use, and agrees on some cryptographic parameters. Once parameters have been setup, the cryptographic layer is responsible for encrypting the stream of data.

Experience shows that the performance of a TLS library most often boils down to the performance of the underlying cryptography. The handshake is network-bound, but when transmitting a big file, encryption needs to be fast. This means that for Everest, we need super efficient cryptography. Fortunately, many smart people have spent a lot of time and energy writing super-neat C implementations that squeeze the last bit of performance out of your compiler. However, we wish to write and verify our programs in F*, not C.

This is where KreMLin comes in. The workflow is as follows: one takes a neatly optimized cryptographic routine, then translates it into F* syntax (“shallow embedding”); using KreMLin, one extracts it back to C, but gets a verified version that pretty much looks like the original. For instance, here’s a bit of F* that implements the main entry point of Chacha20.

let rec counter_mode key iv counter len plaintext ciphertext = if len =^ 0 ul then () else if len <^ blocklen then (* encrypt final partial block *) begin let cipher = sub ciphertext 0 ul len in let plain = sub plaintext 0 ul len in prf cipher key iv counter len ; xor_bytes_inplace cipher plain len end else (* encrypt full block *) begin let cipher = sub ciphertext 0 ul blocklen in let plain = sub plaintext 0 ul blocklen in prf cipher key iv counter blocklen ; xor_bytes_inplace cipher plain blocklen ; let len = len -^ blocklen in let ciphertext = sub ciphertext blocklen len in let plaintext = sub plaintext blocklen len in counter_mode key iv ( counter +^ 1 ul ) len plaintext ciphertext end

One goes great lengths to prove the following properties of this piece of F* code.

Memory safety. We model stack allocation in F* using a new Stack effect; one may only allocate local mutable variables, or buffers on the stack. Every buffer operation needs to prove that the buffer is still live, and that the index is within bounds. For instance, in the code above, the calls to sub take a pointer into one of these buffers, and verification happens behind the scenes.

We model stack allocation in F* using a new effect; one may only allocate local mutable variables, or buffers on the stack. Every buffer operation needs to prove that the buffer is still live, and that the index is within bounds. For instance, in the code above, the calls to take a pointer into one of these buffers, and verification happens behind the scenes. Functional correctness. We have written in this style a bignum library, some elliptic curve operations, stream ciphers and mac algorithms, as well as an AEAD construction. For the math part, for instance, the optimized curve operations are shown to implement the correct mathematical operations.

We have written in this style a bignum library, some elliptic curve operations, stream ciphers and mac algorithms, as well as an AEAD construction. For the math part, for instance, the optimized curve operations are shown to implement the correct mathematical operations. Cryptographic properties. By using a technique called “idealization”, one can prove two versions of the same code: one that relies on cryptographic assumptions, such as “this function can be replaced by a function that returns random bytes”; and one that actually uses real cryptography instead of Random.bytes() . The code branches on an ideal boolean; for cryptographic proof purposes, we consider the ideal case; for extraction purposes, we only consider the other, “real” case.

F* already performs erasure and extraction for its OCaml backend; the tool I wrote, KreMLin, takes it from there and performs further rewritings and transformations so that the code ends up in a limited, first-order, monomorphic subset of F* called Low*. If code falls within the Low* subset, then KreMLin knows how to translate it to C. Here’s what comes out of the tool after extraction:

void Crypto_Symmetric_Chacha20_counter_mode( uint8_t *key, uint8_t *iv, uint32_t counter, uint32_t len, uint8_t *plaintext, uint8_t *ciphertext ) { if (len == UINT32_C(0)) { } else if (len < Crypto_Symmetric_Chacha20_blocklen) { uint8_t *cipher = ciphertext + UINT32_C(0); uint8_t *plain = plaintext + UINT32_C(0); Crypto_Symmetric_Chacha20_prf(cipher, key, iv, counter, len); Buffer_Utils_xor_bytes_inplace(cipher, plain, len); } else { uint8_t *cipher = ciphertext + UINT32_C(0); uint8_t *plain = plaintext + UINT32_C(0); Crypto_Symmetric_Chacha20_prf(cipher, key, iv, counter, Crypto_Symmetric_Chacha20_blocklen); Buffer_Utils_xor_bytes_inplace(cipher, plain, Crypto_Symmetric_Chacha20_blocklen); uint32_t len0 = len - Crypto_Symmetric_Chacha20_blocklen; uint8_t *ciphertext0 = ciphertext + Crypto_Symmetric_Chacha20_blocklen; uint8_t *plaintext0 = plaintext + Crypto_Symmetric_Chacha20_blocklen; Crypto_Symmetric_Chacha20_counter_mode(key, iv, counter + UINT32_C(1), len0, plaintext0, ciphertext0); } }

One can see that the tool goes great length to generate beautiful C: names and control-flow are preserved, and everything is pretty-printed. This is to tackle the second concern I mentioned initially: there is no hope of getting a browser vendor to integrate code written in F*, which would be considered in that setting “not a real language”. In constract, by offering an extracted C version of our library, we have reasonable hope that reviewers can skim the code, convince themselves that it’s legit, and take us a little bit more seriously.

We worked out a simulation between Low* and a simplified version of C we dubbed “C*”; this grounds our translation in some theoretical basis. The simulation covers trace preservation: if the program does not have side channels in the first place, then the translation from Low* to C* does not introduce any new side channels. The tool is unverified; we plan to extend the formalism to cover more of the transformations performed by the tool; in the long run, I would like to write KreMLin in F* and certify it, but that seems non-trivial.

We have adopted that style for an entire body of cryptographic code (> 10,000 lines of F*, including whitespace and comments), and obtain competitive performance. Right now, the tool and formalism deal with one specific flavor of code that performs stack-based allocation only. However, we are extending it right now to deal with other patterns of allocation, such as allocation on the heap.

KreMLin is currently written in OCaml; I re-used a fair number of tricks from my earlier Mezzo project to make writing transformation passes on the internal AST easier. These including monomorphization, inlining, hoisting and rewritings to go from an expression language to a statement language, and some tricks to go from the ML scoping rules to the C ones.

KreMLin is open-source; we have an ML’16 abstract if you’re curious, as well as some slides.