Section: New Software and Platforms

HACL*

Participants : Karthikeyan Bhargavan, Jean Karim Zinzindohoué, Marina Polubelova, Benjamin Beurdouche, Jonathan Protzenko [Microsoft Research] .

HACL* is a verified cryptographic library written in F*. It implements modern primitives, including elliptic curves like Curve25519, symmetric ciphers like Chacha20, and MAC algorithms like Poly1305. These primitives are then composed into higher-level constructions like Authenticated Encryption with Additional Data (AEAD) and the NaCl API. All the code in HACL* is verified for memory safety, side channel resistance, and where applicable, also for functional correctness and absence of integer overflow. HACL* code is used as the basis for cryptographic proofs for security in the miTLS project.

HACL* code can be compiled to OCaml using the standard F* compiler, or to C, using the Kremlin backend of F*. The generated C code is as fast as state-of-the-art cryptographic libraries written in C. HACL* is being actively developed on Github; see https://github.com/mitls/hacl-star