Abstraction-carrying code

Abstract

Proof-Carrying Code (PCC) is a general approach to mobile code safety in which programs are augmented with a certificate (or proof). The practical uptake of PCC greatly depends on the existence of a variety of enabling technologies which allow both to prove programs correct and to replace a costly verification process by an efficient checking procedure on the consumer side. In this work we propose Abstraction-Carrying Code (ACC), a novel approach which uses abstract interpretation as enabling technology. We argue that the large body of applications of abstract interpretation to program verification is amenable to the overall PCC scheme. In particular, we rely on an expressive class of safety policies which can be defined over different abstract domains. We use an abstraction (or abstract model) of the program computed by standard static analyzers as a certificate. The validity of the abstraction on the consumer side is checked in a single-pass by a very efficient and specialized abstract-interpreter. We believe that ACC brings the expressiveness, flexibility and automation which is inherent in abstract interpretation techniques to the area of mobile code safety. We have implemented and benchmarked ACC within the Ciao system preprocessor. The experimental results show that the checking phase is indeed faster than the proof generation phase, and that the sizes of certificates are reasonable. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.