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· 11 min read

We are starting to work on a new product, coq-of-python. The idea of this tool is, as you can guess, to translate Python code to the proof system Coq.

We want to import specifications written in Python to a formal system like Coq. In particular, we are interested in the reference specification of Ethereum, which describes how EVM smart contracts run. Then, we will be able to use this specification to either formally verify the various implementations of the EVM or smart contracts.

All this effort follows a Tweet from Vitalik Buterin hoping for more formal verification of the Ethereum's code:

One application of AI that I am excited about is AI-assisted formal verification of code and bug finding.

Right now ethereum's biggest technical risk probably is bugs in code, and anything that could significantly change the game on that would be amazing.

— Vitalik Buterin

We will now describe the technical development of coq-of-python. For the curious, all the code is on GitHub: formal-land/coq-of-python.

· 6 min read

We continue our work on formal verification of Rust programs with our tool coq-of-rust, to translate Rust code to the formal proof system Coq. One of the limitation we had was the handling of primitive constructs from the standard library of Rust, like Option::unwrap_or_default or all other primitive functions. For each of these functions, we had to make a Coq definition to represent its behavior. This is both tedious and error prone.

To solve this issue, we worked on the translation of the core and alloc crates of Rust using coq-of-rust. These are very large code bases, with a lot of unsafe or advanced Rust code. We present what we did to have a "best effort" translation of these crates. The resulting translation is in the following folders:

· 6 min read

At Formal Land our mission is to reduce the cost of finding bugs in software. We use formal verification, that is to say mathematical reasoning on code, to make sure we find more bugs than with testing. As part of this effort, we are working on a tool coq-of-rust to translate Rust code to Coq, a proof assistant, to analyze Rust programs. Here we present a technical improvement we made in this tool.

One of the challenges of our translation from Rust to Coq is that the generated code is very verbose. The size increase is about ten folds in our examples. A reasons is that we use a monad to represent side effects in Coq, so we need to name each intermediate result and apply the bind operator. Here, we will present a monadic notation that prevents naming intermediate results to make the code more readable.

· 11 min read

We explained how we started updating our translation tool coq-of-rust in our previous blog post, to support more of the Rust language. Our goal is to provide formal verification for the Rust 🦀 language, relying on the proof system Coq 🐓. We will see in this post how we continue implementing changes in coq-of-rust to:

  1. remove the types from the translation,
  2. be independent of the ordering of the definitions.

· 10 min read

In our previous blog post, we stated our plan to improve our translation of Rust 🦀 to Coq 🐓 with coq-of-rust. We also provided a new definition for our Rust monad in Coq, and the definition of a unified type to represent any Rust values. We will now see how we modify the Rust implementation of coq-of-rust to make the generated code use these new definitions.

With this new translation strategy, to support more Rust code, we want:

  1. to remove the types from the translation,
  2. to avoid the need to order the definitions in the generated Coq code.

· 13 min read

Our tool coq-of-rust is translating Rust 🦀 programs to the proof system Coq 🐓 to do formal verification on Rust programs. Even if we are able to verify realistic code, such as an ERC-20 smart contract, coq-of-rust still has some limitations:

  • fragile trait handling
  • difficulties in ordering the definitions, in their order of dependencies as required by Coq

We will present how we plan to improve our tool to address these limitations.

· 13 min read

In this blog post, we present our development steps to build a tool to translate Go programs to the proof system Coq.

The goal is to formally verify Go programs to make them totally bug-free. It is actually possible to make a program totally bug-free, as formal verification can cover all execution cases and kinds of properties thanks to the use of mathematical methods. This corresponds to the highest level of the Evaluation Assurance Levels used for critical applications, such as the space industry.

All the code of our work is available on GitHub at github.com/formal-land/coq-of-go.

· 5 min read

We present an experiment coq-of-hs that we have made on the translation of Haskell programs to the proof system Coq 🐓. The goal is to formally verify Haskell programs to make them totally bug-free.

Indeed, even with the use of a strict type system, there can still be bugs for properties that cannot be expressed with types. An example of such a property is the backward compatibility of an API endpoint for the new release of a web service when there has been code refactoring. Only formal verification can cover all execution cases and kinds of properties.

The code of the tool is at: github.com/formal-land/coq-of-hs-experiment (AGPL license)

· 6 min read

Ensuring Flawless Software in a Flawed World

In this blog post, we present what formal verification is and why this is such a valuable tool to improve the security of your applications.

· 4 min read

We continue our work on the coq-of-rust tool to formally verify Rust programs with the Coq proof assistant. We have upgraded the Rust version that we support, simplified the translation of the traits, and are adding better support for the standard library of Rust.

Overall, we are now able to translate about 80% of the Rust examples from the Rust by Example book into valid Coq files. This means we support a large subset of the Rust language.