cryptol

Like most things, the kernel of tomorrow's ideas is already here. On the scale of the next five years, these ideas will give rise to what the future of programming will look like: * Refinement types Liquid Haskell: https://ucsd-progsys.github.io/liquidhaskell-tutorial/02-log... * SMT Solver Language Integration Cryptol: https://github.com/GaloisInc/cryptol * Session Types Scribble: http://www.scribble.org/ * Dependent Types Agda: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agda_(programming_language) Idris: http://www.idris-lang.org/ * Effect typing Koka: https://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/daan/madoko/d... * Formal verification Coq: https://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/sf/current/index.html TLA+: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/tla/tl... This is the general trend, generally making more composable abstractions and smart

Cryptol does something pretty similar. You implement your functions in Cryptol and then verify them with SAT/SMT solvers, or generative testing. Its less about verifying the C/C++ implementations and more about verifying properties of the algorithms themselves. (Example: https://github.com/GaloisInc/cryptol/blob/master/examples/ZU...)

Typically, cryptographic primitives (like block ciphers, hash functions, KDFs, etc) are written in C. Bugs are caught solely by the use of a sharp mind and careful reading. There are really two reasons for this: (1) optimization is a really big deal; some impls go so far as to have asm for specific architectures or use architecture-specific features like SSE2 and (2) there really isn't very much code for a cryptographic primitive, typically <=1000 lines. (e.g., see https://github.com/khovratovich/Argon2/tree/master/Argon2i/r...). Once a simple reference implementation is hand-checked, it can be used to generate comprehensive test vectors for other implementations. This isn't my area of expertise, but I believe there's some research in applied crypto for implementation verification. I know https://github.com/GaloisInc/cryptol is a language

> The Cryptol specification language was designed by Galois for the NSA's Trusted Systems Research Group as a public standard for specifying cryptographic algorithms. > In addition, much of the work on Cryptol has been funded by, and lots of design input was provided by the team at the NSA's Trusted Systems Research Group, including Brad Martin, Frank Taylor and Sean Weaver. https://github.com/GaloisInc/cryptol