Reasoning About a Machine with Local Capabilities: Provably Safe Stack and Return Pointer Management - Technical Appendix Including Proofs and Details

TL;DR

This paper introduces a calling convention for capability machines that guarantees local state encapsulation and correct control flow, supported by formal proofs and practical examples.

Contribution

It presents a novel calling convention for capability machines with local capabilities, along with formal correctness proofs and illustrative program examples.

Findings

The calling convention ensures local-state encapsulation.

Formal proofs verify correct behavior of programs.

Practical examples demonstrate the convention's effectiveness.

Abstract

We propose a calling convention for capability machines with local capabilities. The calling convention ensures local-state encapsulation and well-bracketed control flow. We use the calling convention in a hand-full of program examples and prove that they behave correctly. The correctness proofs use a logical relation that is also presented in this appendix. This is the technical appendix for the paper with the same name and authors accepted at ESOP18 and under review for TOPLAS.