Section: Overall Objectives

Project overview

The overall goal of the Celtique  project is to improve the security and reliability of software with semantics-based modeling, analysis and certification techniques. To achieve this goal, the project conducts work on improving semantic description and analysis techniques, as well as work on using proof assistants (most notably Coq) to develop and prove properties of these techniques. We are applying such techniques to a variety of source languages, including Java, C, and JavaScript. We also study how these techniques apply to low-level languages, and how they can be combined with certified compilation. The CompCert certified compiler and its intermediate representations are used for much of our work on semantic modeling and analysis of C and lower-level representations.

The semantic analyses extract approximate but sound descriptions of software behaviour from which a proof of safety or security can be constructed. The analyses of interest include numerical data flow analysis, control flow analysis for higher-order languages, alias and points-to analysis for heap structure manipulation. In particular, we have designed several analyses for information flow control, aimed at computing attacker knowledge and detecting side channels.

We work with three application domains: Java software for small devices, embedded C programs, and web applications.

Celtique  is a joint project with the CNRS, the University of Rennes 1 and ENS Rennes.