Section: Research Program

F*: A Higher-Order Effectful Language for Program Verification

F* [73], [49] is a verification system for effectful programs developed collaboratively by Inria and Microsoft Research. It puts together the automation of an SMT-backed deductive verification tool with the expressive power of a proof assistant based on dependent types. After verification, F* programs can be extracted to efficient OCaml, F#, or C code [71]. This enables verifying the functional correctness and security of realistic applications. F*'s type system includes dependent types, monadic effects, refinement types, and a weakest precondition calculus. Together, these features allow expressing precise and compact specifications for programs, including functional correctness and security properties. The F* type-checker aims to prove that programs meet their specifications using a combination of SMT solving and interactive proofs. The main ongoing use case of F* is building a verified, drop-in replacement for the whole HTTPS stack in Project Everest. This includes verified implementations of TLS 1.2 and 1.3 [54] and of the underlying cryptographic primitives [74].