Section: New Results

Verified Software for Cryptographic Web Applications

Participants : Karthikeyan Bhargavan, Benjamin Beurdouche, Denis Merigoux, Jonathan Protzenko.

WebAssembly in a new language runtime that is now supported by all major web browsers and web application frameworks. We developed a compiler from the Low* subset of the F* programming language to WebAssembly and used this compiler to translate our HACL* verified cryptographic library to WebAssembly, hence obtaining the first verified cryptographic library for the Web. We also used this framework to develop and verify an implementation of the Signal protocol in WebAssembly, and demonstrated how this implementation can be used as a drop-in replacement for the libsignal-protocol library used in mainstream messaging applications like Signal, WhatsApp, and Skype.

Our work was published at the IEEE Security and Privacy conference [24]. Our WebAssembly version of HACL* and our verified Signal implementation were publicly released as open source on GitHub.