Verifying Arithmetic Assembly Programs in Cryptographic Primitives

Arithmetic over large finite fields is indispensable in modern cryptography. For efficienty, these operations are often implemented in manually optimized assembly programs. Since these arithmetic assembly programs necessarily perform lots of non-linear computation, checking their correctness is a challenging verification problem. We develop techniques to verify such programs automatically in this paper. Using our techniques, we have successfully verified a number of assembly programs in OpenSSL. Moreover, our tool verifies the boringSSL Montgomery Ladderstep (about 1400 assembly instructions) in 1 hour. This is by far the fastest verification technique for such programs. 2012 ACM Subject Classification Software and its engineering → Formal software verification