PEPM 2022 – Proceedings

Message from the Chairs
We are pleased to present the proceedings of the 2022 ACM SIGPLAN Workshop on Partial Evaluation and Program Manipulation (PEPM 2022), held January 17–18th, 2022 in Philadelphia, in affiliation with the annual Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL 2022). PEPM has a history going back to 1991 and originated with the discoveries of useful automated techniques for evaluating programs with only partial input. Over the years, the scope of PEPM has expanded to include a variety of research areas centered around the theme of semantics-based program manipulation ― the systematic exploitation of treating programs not only as subjects to black-box execution but also as data structures that can be generated, analysed, and transformed while establishing or maintaining important semantic properties.

Papers

Dependent Tagless Final
Nicolas Biri
(Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology, Luxembourg)
Tagless final embedding provides a solution to the expression problem that allows efficient code generation, thanks to multi-staged evaluation. It can, however, be a challenge to compose effectful language fragments in this embedding. This paper proposes a dependent tagless final embedding that uses dependent types to ease the composition of effects. We show that this extension preserves the multi-staging capabilities of tagless final and can help scope effects in domain-specific languages.

Publisher's Version

Semi-automatic Ladderisation: Improving Code Security through Rewriting and Dependent Types
Christopher Brown, Adam D. Barwell, Yoann Marquer, Olivier Zendra, Tania Richmond, and Chen Gu
(University of St. Andrews, UK; Imperial College London, UK; Inria, France; DGA, France; Hefei University of Technology, China)
Cyber attacks become more and more prevalent every day. One type of cyber attack is known as a side channel attack, where attackers exploit information leakage from the physical execution of a program, e.g. timing or power leakage, to uncover secret information, such as encryption keys or other sensitive data. There have been various attempts at addressing the problem of preventing side-channel attacks, often relying on various measures to decrease the discernibility of several code variants or code paths. Most techniques require a high-degree of expertise by the developer, who often employs ad hoc, hand-crafted code-patching in an attempt to make it more secure. In this paper, we take a different approach: building on the idea of ladderisation, inspired by Montgomery Ladders. We present a semi-automatic tool-supported technique, aimed at the non-specialised developer, which refactors (a class of) C programs into functionally (and even algorithmically) equivalent counterparts with improved security properties. Our approach provides refactorings that transform the source code into its ladderised equivalent, driven by an underlying verified rewrite system, based on dependent types. Our rewrite system automatically finds rewritings of selected C expressions, facilitating the production of their equivalent ladderised counterparts for a subset of C. We demonstrate our approach on a number of representative examples from the cryptographic domain, showing increased security.

Publisher's Version

PEPM 2022 – Proceedings

2022 ACM SIGPLAN International Workshop on Partial Evaluation and Program Manipulation (PEPM 2022)

Frontmatter

Papers