Certifying assembly programs with trails

摘要

In this paper, we introduce a new way of certifying assembly programs. Unlike previous program logics, we extract the control-flow information from the code and generate an intermediate trail between the specification and the real code. Trails are auxiliary specifications and treated as modules in the certification process. We define a simple modular program logic called trail-based certified assembly programming (TCAP) to certify and link different parts of a program using the corresponding trails. Because the control flow information in trails is explicit, the rules are easier to design. We show that our logic is powerful enough to prove partial correctness of assembly programs with features including stack-based abstractions and self-modifying code.We also provide a semantics for TCAP and prove that the logic is sound with respect to the semantics.