Cryptol

Abstract

Communications security is paramount in defense applications. Thus cryptographic algorithms are employed everywhere, from smartcards to hand-held field radios to central servers. The cryptography has to be strong (no-one can break the algorithm), correctly and securely implemented (no-one can hack the code), and efficient (you don't notice it is being used).It can be very expensive to deploy high-grade cryptographic applications. Much of the cost is to meet certification requirements, where evaluators (independent crypto experts) analyze every aspect of the design and implementation, with full access to the source code. As a developer, the onus is on you: unless you can convince the evaluators your crypto-device is correct and secure, it will be rejected.At Galois, we have been developing Cryptol, a domainspecific language and toolset for formally specifying, implementing, and verifying cryptographic algorithms. Cryptol is intended to dramatically reduce the cost of crypto certification and deployment. We have employed a variety of lightweight (i.e. highly automatable) formal methods towards this: