Abstract
Semantics preserving compilation of low-level C programs is challenging because their semantics is implementation defined according to the C standard. This paper presents the proof of an enhanced and more concrete memory model for the CompCert C compiler which assigns a definite meaning to more C programs. In our new formally verified memory model, pointers are still abstract but are nonetheless mapped to concrete 32-bit integers. Hence, the memory is finite and it is possible to reason about the binary encoding of pointers. We prove that the existing memory model is an abstraction of our more concrete model thus validating formally the soundness of CompCert’s abstract semantics of pointers. We also show how to adapt the front-end of CompCert thus demonstrating that it should be feasible to port the whole compiler to our novel memory model.
This work was partially supported by the French ANR-14-CE28-0014 AnaStaSec.
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Notes
- 1.
The official C standard is in general even stricter.
- 2.
The notation [i] denotes the machine integer i when interpreted as unsigned.
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Besson, F., Blazy, S., Wilke, P. (2015). A Concrete Memory Model for CompCert. In: Urban, C., Zhang, X. (eds) Interactive Theorem Proving. ITP 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9236. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22102-1_5
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