Galápagos: Developing Verified Low Level Cryptography on Heterogeneous Hardwares

The proliferation of new hardware designs makes it difficult to produce high-performance cryptographic implementations tailored at the assembly level to each platform, let alone to prove such implementations correct. Hence we introduce Galápagos, an extensible framework designed to reduce the effort of verifying cryptographic implementations across different ISAs. In Galápagos, a developer proves their high-level implementation strategy correct once and then bundles both strategy and proof into an abstract module. The module can then be instantiated and connected to each platform-specific implementation. Galápagos facilitates this connection by generically raising the abstraction of the targeted platforms, and via a collection of new verified libraries and tool improvements to help automate the proof process. We validate Galápagos via multiple verified cryptographic implementations across three starkly different platforms: a 256-bit special-purpose accelerator, a 16-bit minimal ISA (the MSP430), and a standard 32-bit RISC-V CPU. Our case studies are derived from a real-world use case, the OpenTitan security chip, which is deploying our verified cryptographic code at scale. CCS CONCEPTS • Software and its engineering → Software verification.