A Semantic Model of Types and Machine Instructions for Proof-Carrying Code

Proof-carrying code is a framework for proving the safety of machine-language programs with a machinecheckable proof. Such proofs have previously defined type-checking rules as part of the logic. We show a universal type framework for proof-carrying code that will allow a code producer to choose a programming language, prove the type rules for that language as lemmas in higher-order logic, then use those lemmas to prove the safety of a particular program. We show how to handle traversal, allocation, and initialization of values in a wide variety of types, including functions, records, unions, existentials, and covariant recursive types.