Project Everest began at Microsoft Research in 2016, aiming to spur research in program verification to produce industrial-grade software. In collaboration with INRIA and Carnegie Mellon University, Project Everest’s goal was to produce drop-in verified replacements of secure communications software used in the HTTPS ecosystem, including TLS, the underlying cryptography, and related subprotocols. Now, almost a decade later, we reflect on the project, sharing both its successes and failures, and look ahead to the next decade of program verification research.

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.

Computationally sound protocol verification tools promise to deliver full-strength cryptographic proofs for security protocols. Unfortunately, current tools lack either modularity or automation. We propose a new approach based on a novel use of information flow and refinement types for sound cryptographic proofs. Our framework, Owl, allows type-based modular descriptions of security protocols, wherein disjoint subprotocols can be programmed and automatically proved secure separately.We give a formal security proof for Owl via a core language which supports symmetric and asymmetric primitives, Diffie-Hellman operations, and hashing via random oracles. We also implement a type checker for Owl and a prototype extraction mechanism to Rust, and evaluate both on 14 case studies, including (simplified forms of) SSH key exchange and Kerberos.

Steel is a language for developing and proving concurrent programs embedded in F ⋆ , a dependently typed programming language and proof assistant. Based on SteelCore, a concurrent separation logic (CSL) formalized in F ⋆ , our work focuses on exposing the proof rules of the logic in a form that enables programs and proofs to be effectively co-developed. Our main contributions include a new formulation of a Hoare logic of quintuples involving both separation logic and first-order logic, enabling efficient verification condition (VC) generation and proof discharge using a combination of tactics and SMT solving. We relate the VCs produced by our quintuple system to solving a system of associativity-commutativity (AC) unification constraints and develop tactics to (partially) solve these constraints using AC-matching modulo SMT-dischargeable equations. Our system is fully mechanized and implemented in F ⋆ . We evaluate it by developing several verified programs and libraries, including various sequential and concurrent linked data structures, proof libraries, and a library for 2-party session types. Our experience leads us to conclude that our system enables a mixture of automated and interactive proof, making it productive to build programs foundationally verified against a highly expressive, state-of-the-art CSL.