A Deductive System for Contract Satisfaction Proofs

Computer Science > Programming Languages [Submitted on 10 Apr 2026] A Deductive System for Contract Satisfaction Proofs Arthur Correnson, Haoyi Zeng, Jana Hofmann Hardware-software contracts are abstract specifications of a CPU's leakage behavior. They enable verifying the security of high-level programs against side-channel attacks without having to explicitly reason about the microarchitectural details of the CPU. Using the abstraction powers of a contract requires proving that the targeted CPU satisfies the contract in the sense that the contract over-approximates the CPU's leakage. Besides pen-and-paper reasoning, proving contract satisfaction has been approached mostly from the model-checking perspective, with approaches based on a (semi-)automated search for the necessary invariants. As an alternative, this paper explores how such proofs can be conducted in interactive proof assistants. We start by observing that contract satisfaction is an instance of a more general problem we call relative trace equality, and we introduce relative bisimulation as an associated proof technique. Leveraging recent advances in the field of coinductive proofs, we develop a deductive proof system for relative trace equality. Our system is provably sound and complete, and it enables a modular and incremental proof style. It also features several reasoning principles to simplify proofs by exploiting symmetries and transitivity properties. We formalized our deductive system in the Rocq proof assistant and applied it to two challenging contract satisfaction proofs. Subjects: Programming Languages (cs.PL); Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Logic in Computer Science (cs.LO) Cite as: arXiv:2604.09165 [cs.PL]   (or arXiv:2604.09165v1 [cs.PL] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2604.09165 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Arthur Correnson [view email] [v1] Fri, 10 Apr 2026 09:51:24 UTC (86 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.PL < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-04 Change to browse by: cs cs.CR cs.LO References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)