Section: New Results

HACL*: A Verified Modern Cryptographic Library

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

HACL* is a verified portable C cryptographic library that implements modern cryptographic primitives such as the ChaCha20 and Salsa20 encryption algorithms, Poly1305 and HMAC message authentication, SHA-256 and SHA-512 hash functions, the Curve25519 elliptic curve, and Ed25519 signatures.

HACL* is written in the F* programming language and then compiled to readable C code using the KreMLin tool [18]. The F* source code for each cryptographic primitive is verified for memory safety, mitigations against timing side-channels, and functional correctness with respect to a succinct high-level specification of the primitive derived from its published standard. The translation from F* to C preserves these properties and the generated C code can itself be compiled via the CompCert verified C compiler or mainstream compilers like GCC or CLANG. When compiled with GCC on 64-bit platforms, our primitives are as fast as the fastest pure C implementations in OpenSSL and Libsodium, significantly faster than the reference C code in TweetNaCl, and between 1.1x-5.7x slower than the fastest hand-optimized vectorized assembly code in the SUPERCOP benchmark test-suite.

HACL* implements the NaCl cryptographic API and can be used as a drop-in replacement for NaCl libraries like Libsodium and TweetNaCl. HACL* provides the cryptographic components for a new mandatory ciphersuite in TLS 1.3 and is being developed as the main cryptographic provider for the miTLS verified implementation. Primitives from HACL* have now been integrated within Mozilla’s NSS cryptographic library. Our results show that writing fast, verified, and usable C cryptographic libraries is now practical.

This work appeared at the ACM CCS conference [36] and all our software is publicly available and in active development on GitHub.