An equivalence-preserving CPS translation via multi-language semantics

Language-based security relies on the assumption that all potential attacks follow the rules of the language in question. When programs are compiled into a different language, this is true only if the translation process preserves observational equivalence.

To prove that a translation preserves equivalence, one must show that if two program fragments cannot be distinguished by any source context, then their translations cannot be distinguished by any target context. Informally, target contexts must be no more powerful than source contexts, i.e., for every target context there exists a source context that "behaves the same." This seems to amount to being able to "back-translate" arbitrary target terms. However, that is simply not viable for practical compilers where the target language is lower-level and, thus, contains expressions that have no source equivalent.

In this paper, we give a CPS translation from a less expressive source language (STLC) to a more expressive target language (System F) and prove that the translation preserves observational equivalence. The key to our equivalence-preserving compilation is the choice of the right type translation: a source type σ mandates a set of behaviors and we must ensure that its translation σ⁺ mandates semantically equivalent behaviors at the target level. Based on this type translation, we demonstrate how to prove that for every target term of type σ⁺, there exists an equivalent source term of type σ- even when sub-terms of the target term are not necessarily "back-translatable" themselves. A key novelty of our proof, resulting in a pleasant proof structure, is that it leverages a multi-language semantics where source and target terms may interoperate.