arXiv subjects

Guillaume Boisseau

Publications and source records attributed to Guillaume Boisseau.

8 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Scaling Verification of Cryptographic Software with Aeneas, Rust, and Lean

We develop a new methodology for verifying cryptographic software. We target production code written in Rust for performance and system integration, rather than verification convenience. Rust's ownership discipline enables Aeneas to extract a pure model of this code in Lean, relieving us from low-level reasoning about pointer liveness and aliasing. Lean's extensibility lets us develop tactics and libraries that greatly simplify reasoning about extracted Rust code. We design and tune our toolchain to facilitate the use of AI. Agents autonomously write formal proofs, which are independently verified by the Lean kernel. Agents also assist in the formalization of cryptographic standards and platform-specific intrinsics, which still requires expert design and review. We apply our methodology to SymCrypt, Microsoft's cryptographic provider. We verify its implementations of algorithms such as SHA-3 and ML-KEM, which were ported from C to Rust. We also extend SymCrypt with experimental optimizations and implementations of algorithms such as FrodoKEM, ML-DSA, and HPKE to explore the scalability of writing, adapting, and verifying cryptographic code. Our 237~KLOC Lean development establishes safety, panic-freedom, and functional correctness of 16.7~KLOC of Rust code supporting post-quantum cipher suites for x86-64 and ARM platforms. Our evaluation shows that verified Rust can meet SymCrypt's performance, portability, deployment, and maintainability requirements.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2025

Charon: An Analysis Framework for Rust

With the explosion in popularity of the Rust programming language, a wealth of tools have recently been developed to analyze, verify, and test Rust programs. Alas, the Rust ecosystem remains relatively young, meaning that every one of these tools has had to re-implement difficult, time-consuming machinery to interface with the Rust compiler and its cargo build system, to hook into the Rust compiler's internal representation, and to expose an abstract syntax tree (AST) that is suitable for analysis rather than optimized for efficiency. We address this missing building block of the Rust ecosystem, and propose Charon, an analysis framework for Rust. Charon acts as a swiss-army knife for analyzing Rust programs, and deals with all of the tedium above, providing clients with a clean, stable AST that can serve as the foundation of many analyses. We demonstrate the usefulness of Charon through a series of case studies, ranging from a Rust verification framework (Aeneas), a compiler from Rust to C (Eurydice), and a novel taint-checker for cryptographic code. To drive the point home, we also re-implement a popular existing analysis (Rudra), and show that it can be replicated by leveraging the Charon framework.

cs.PL↗

arXiv2023

Cornering Optics

We show that the category of optics in a monoidal category arises naturally from the free cornering of that category. Further, we show that the free cornering of a monoidal category is a natural setting in which to work with comb diagrams over that category. The free cornering admits an intuitive graphical calculus, which in light of our work may be used to reason about optics and comb diagrams.

math.CT↗

arXiv2022

String Diagrammatic Electrical Circuit Theory

We develop a comprehensive string diagrammatic treatment of electrical circuits. Building on previous, limited case studies, we introduce controlled sources and meters as elements, and the impedance calculus, a powerful toolbox for diagrammatic reasoning on circuit diagrams. We demonstrate the power of our approach by giving idiomatic proofs of several textbook results, including the superposition theorem and Thevenin's theorem.

cs.LO↗

arXiv2021

Graphical Piecewise-Linear Algebra

Graphical (Linear) Algebra is a family of diagrammatic languages allowing to reason about different kinds of subsets of vector spaces compositionally. It has been used to model various application domains, from signal-flow graphs to Petri nets and electrical circuits. In this paper, we introduce to the family its most expressive member to date: Graphical Piecewise-Linear Algebra, a new language to specify piecewise-linear subsets of vector spaces. Like the previous members of the family, it comes with a complete axiomatisation, which means it can be used to reason about the corresponding semantic domain purely equationally, forgetting the set-theoretic interpretation. We show completeness using a single axiom on top of Graphical Polyhedral Algebra, and show that this extension is the smallest that can capture a variety of relevant constructs. Finally, we showcase its use by modelling the behaviour of stateless electronic circuits of ideal elements, a domain that had remained outside the remit of previous diagrammatic languages.

cs.LO↗

arXiv2021

The Safari of Update Structures: Visiting the Lens and Quantum Enclosures

We build upon our recently introduced concept of an update structure to show that it is a generalisation of very-well-behaved lenses, that is, there is a bijection between a strict subset of update structures and vwb lenses in cartesian categories. We show that update structures are also sufficiently general to capture quantum observables, pinpointing the additional assumptions required to make the two coincide. In doing so, we shift the focus from special commutative dagger-Frobenius algebras to interacting (co)magma (co)module pairs, showing that the algebraic properties of the (co)multiplication arise from the module-comodule interaction, rather than direct assumptions about the magma-comagma pair. We then begin to investigate the zoo of possible update structures, introducing the notions of classical security-flagged databases, and databases of quantum systems. This work is of foundational interest as update structures place previously distinct areas of research in a general class of operationally motivated structures, we expect the taming of this class to illuminate novel relationships between separately studied topics in computer science, physics and mathematics.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2020

String Diagrams for Optics

Optics are a data representation for compositional data access, with lenses as a popular special case. Hedges has presented a diagrammatic calculus for lenses, but in a way that does not generalize to other classes of optic. We present a calculus that works for all optics, not just lenses; this is done by embedding optics into their presheaf category, which naturally features string diagrams. We apply our calculus to the common case of lenses, extend it to effectful lenses, and explore how the laws of optics manifest in this setting.

math.CT↗

arXiv2020

Understanding Profunctor Optics: a representation theorem

Optics, aka functional references, are classes of tools that allow composable access into compound data structures. Usually defined as programming language libraries, they provide combinators to manipulate different shapes of data such as sums, products and collections, that can be composed to operate on larger structures. Together they form a powerful language to describe transformations of data. Among the different approaches to describing optics, one particular type of optics, called profunctor optics, stands out. It describes alternative but equivalent representations of most of the common combinators, and enhances them with elegant composability properties via a higher-order encoding. Notably, it enables easy composition across different optic families. Unfortunately, profunctor optics are difficult to reason about, and linking usual optics with an equivalent profunctor representation has so far been done on a case-by-case basis, with definitions that sometimes seem very ad hoc. This makes it hard both to analyse properties of existing profunctor optics and to define new ones. This thesis presents an equivalent representation of profunctor optics, called isomorphism optics, that is both closer to intuition and easier to reason about. This tool enables powerful theorems to be derived generically about profunctor optics. Finally, this thesis develops a framework to ease deriving new profunctor encodings from concrete optic families.

cs.PL↗