An Abstract Model of Certificate Translation

Abstract

A certificate is a mathematical object that can be used to establish that a piece of mobile code satisfies some security policy. In general, certificates cannot be generated automatically. There is thus an interest in developing methods to reuse certificates generated for source code to provide strong guarantees of the compiled code correctness. Certificate translation is a method to transform certificates of program correctness along semantically justified program transformations. These methods have been developed in previous work, but they were strongly dependent on particular programming and verification settings. This article provides a more general development in the setting of abstract interpretation, showing the scalability of certificate translation.

Verified Translation Validation of Static Analyses

“…Certificate translation [24], [25] is an alternative approach inspired from proof-carrying code [26], in which the compiler comes equipped with an automated translator which maps correctness proofs of the source program into correctness proofs of the target program. However, this approach is hard to implement for realistic languages.…”