cPLC — A cryptographic programming language and compiler

Abstract

Cryptographic two-party protocols are used ubiquitously in everyday life. While some of these protocols are easy to understand and implement (e.g., key exchange or transmission of encrypted data), many of them are much more complex (e.g., ebanking and e-voting applications, or anonymous authentication and credential systems).For a software engineer without appropriate cryptographic skills the implementation of such protocols is often difficult, time consuming and error-prone. For this reason, a number of compilers supporting programmers have been published in recent years. However, they are either designed for very specific cryptographic primitives (e.g., zero-knowledge proofs of knowledge), or they only offer a very low level of abstraction and thus again demand substantial mathematical and cryptographic skills from the programmer. Finally, some of the existing compilers do not produce executable code, but only metacode which has to be instantiated with mathematical libraries, encryption routines, etc. before it can actually be used.In this paper we present a cryptographically aware compiler which is equally useful to cryptographers who want to benchmark protocols designed on paper, and to programmers who want to implement complex security sensitive protocols without having to understand all subtleties. Our tool offers a high level of abstraction and outputs well-structured and documented Java code. We believe that our compiler can contribute to shortening the development cycles of cryptographic applications and to reducing their error-proneness.

A Survey on Tools and Techniques for the Programming and Verification of Secure Cryptographic Software

“…The use of specific programming languages is not standard practice in secure software development. On the other hand, experts, such as cryptologists, usually prefer their knowledge expressed in its own syntax by domain-specific languages [25][26][27] [28].…”

“…cPLC [25] is a cryptographic Programming Language and Compiler for generating Java implementations of two-party cryptographic protocols, such as Diffie-Hellman. cPCL's input language is strongly inspired by the standard notation for specifying protocols and is, allegedly, the first tool which can be used by cryptographically untrained software engineers to obtain sound implementations of arbitrary two-party protocols, as well as by cryptographers who want to efficiently implement their protocols designed on paper.…”

Full proof cryptography

“…Besides tools for ZK-PoK, there exists a large variety of other domain specific compilers, including Fairplay [44] and VIFF [30] for generating implementations of secure twoparty computations. Also, generic cryptographic compilers o↵ering di↵erently abstract input languages have been proposed, e.g., [4,54,9,40]. However, none of these tools supports formal verification.…”