Rust is a new systems programming language that promises to overcome the seemingly fundamental tradeoff between high-level safety guarantees and low-level control over resource management. Unfortunately, none of Rust's safety claims have been formally proven, and there is good reason to question whether they actually hold. Specifically, Rust employs a strong, ownership-based type system, but then extends the expressive power of this core type system through libraries that internally use unsafe features. In this paper, we give the first formal (and machine-checked) safety proof for a language representing a realistic subset of Rust. Our proof is extensible in the sense that, for each new Rust library that uses unsafe features, we can say what verification condition it must satisfy in order for it to be deemed a safe extension to the language. We have carried out this verification for some of the most important libraries that are used throughout the Rust ecosystem.

Iris is a framework for higher-order concurrent separation logic, which has been implemented in the Coq proof assistant and deployed very effectively in a wide variety of verification projects. Iris was designed with the express goal of simplifying and consolidating the foundations of modern separation logics, but it has evolved over time, and the design and semantic foundations of Iris itself have yet to be fully written down and explained together properly in one place. Here, we attempt to fill this gap, presenting a reasonably complete picture of the latest version of Iris (version 3.1), from first principles and in one coherent narrative.

Coq supports a range of built-in tactics, which are engineered primarily to support backward reasoning. Starting from a desired goal, the Coq programmer can use these tactics to manipulate the proof state interactively, applying axioms or lemmas to break the goal into subgoals until all subgoals have been solved. Additionally, it provides support for tactic programming via OCaml and Ltac, so that users can roll their own custom proof automation routines.
Unfortunately, though, these tactic languages share a significant weakness. They do not offer the tactic programmer any static guarantees about the soundness of their custom tactics, making large tactic developments difficult to maintain. To address this limitation, Ziliani et al. previously proposed Mtac, a new typed approach to custom proof automation in Coq which provides the static guarantees that OCaml and Ltac are missing. However, despite its name, Mtac is really more of a metaprogramming language than it is a full-blown tactic language: it misses an essential feature of tactic programming, namely the ability to directly manipulate Coq’s proof state and perform backward reasoning on it.
In this paper, we present Mtac2, a next-generation version of Mtac that combines its support for typed metaprogramming with additional support for the programming of backward-reasoning tactics in the style of Ltac. In so doing, Mtac2 introduces a novel feature in tactic programming languages—what we call typed backward reasoning. With this feature, Mtac2 is capable of statically ruling out several classes of errors that would otherwise remain undetected at tactic definition time. We demonstrate the utility of Mtac2’s typed tactics by porting several tactics from a large Coq development, the Iris Proof Mode, from Ltac to Mtac2.

A number of tools have been developed for carrying out separation-logic proofs mechanically using an interactive proof assistant. One of the most advanced such tools is the Iris Proof Mode (IPM) for Coq, which offers a rich set of tactics for making separation-logic proofs look and feel like ordinary Coq proofs. However, IPM is tied to a particular separation logic (namely, Iris), thus limiting its applicability.
In this paper, we propose MoSeL, a general and extensible Coq framework that brings the benefits of IPM to a much larger class of separation logics. Unlike IPM, MoSeL is applicable to both affine and linear separation logics (and combinations thereof), and provides generic tactics that can be easily extended to account for the bespoke connectives of the logics with which it is instantiated. To demonstrate the effectiveness of MoSeL, we have instantiated it to provide effective tactical support for interactive and semi-automated proofs in six very different separation logics.

Concurrent separation logics (CSLs) have come of age, and with age they have accumulated a great deal of complexity. Previous work on the Iris logic attempted to reduce the complex logical mechanisms of modern CSLs to two orthogonal concepts: partial commutative monoids (PCMs) and invariants. However, the realization of these concepts in Iris still bakes in several complex mechanisms—such as weakest preconditions and mask-changing view shifts—as primitive notions. In this paper, we take the Iris story to its (so to speak) logical conclusion, applying the reductionist methodology of Iris to Iris itself. Specifically, we define a small, resourceful base logic, which distills the essence of Iris: it comprises only the assertion layer of vanilla separation logic, plus a handful of simple modalities. We then show how the much fancier logical mechanisms of Iris—in particular, its entire program specification layer—can be understood as merely derived forms in our base logic. This approach helps to explain the meaning of Iris’s program specifications at a much higher level of abstraction than was previously possible. We also show that the step-indexed “later” modality of Iris is an essential source of complexity, in that removing it leads to a logical inconsistency. All our results are fully formalized in the Coq proof assistant.