Section: Bilateral Contracts and Grants with Industry

Bilateral Grants with Industry

Evolution, Semantics, and Engineering of the F* Verification System

• Grant from Nomadic Labs - Inria

• PIs: Catalin Hritcu and Exequiel Rivas

• Duration: March 2019 - April 2023

• Abstract: While the F* verification system shows great promise in practice, many challenging conceptual problems remain to be solved, many of which can directly inform the further evolution and design of the language. Moreover, many engineering challenges remain in order to build a truly usable verification system. This proposal promises to help address this by focusing on the following 5 main topics: (1) Generalizing Dijkstra monads, i.e., a program verification technique for arbitrary monadic effects; (2) Relational reasoning in F*: devising scalable verification techniques for properties of multiple program executions (e.g., confidentiality, noninterference) or of multiple programs (e.g., program equivalence); (3) Making F*'s effect system more flexible, by supporting tractable forms of effect polymorphism and allowing some of the effects of a computation to be hidden if they do not impact the observable behavior; (4) Working out more of the F* semantics and metatheory; (5) Solving the engineering challenges of building a usable verification system.