Formalization of security

2026-07-30

AI Summary

This work addresses a central challenge in system security: formally verifying that system designs and implementations satisfy intended safety properties and support security certification. The authors propose a systematic approach grounded in proof assistants, integrating interactive theorem proving and formal methods to precisely model and machine-check critical security properties across diverse domains—including system security, language-level security, secure compilation, and cryptography. By enabling rigorous, machine-verifiable proofs of correctness, this methodology significantly strengthens the formal assurance of security properties and provides a unified theoretical framework and toolchain for constructing verifiable and certifiable secure systems.

Abstract

Proof assistants are often used to validate that designs and implementations meet their expected security properties. A further motivation for using proof assistants is to support certification. This chapter focuses on their applications to system security, language-based security, secure compilation, and cryptography.

Problem

• security formalization
• proof assistants
• system security
• language-based security
• secure compilation

Innovation

• proof assistants
• formal verification
• system security
• secure compilation
• language-based security