Owl

Relevant branches

The main branch tracks recent developments, so the Owl syntax and language features are subject to change. Our release here corresponds to our S&P publication.

Setup

To build and run Owl, you need cabal and ghc in your PATH. You can use ghcup to install them. Additionally, you need the Z3 Prover installed and in your PATH; binary releases are here. Owl has been tested with Z3 version 4.12.1.

To build and run, type cabal run owl.

Extraction

Owl currently features a prototype extraction mechanism generating safe Rust code. To use it, you will need Rust (including cargo and rustfmt) installed and in your PATH.

Suppose you want to extract the protocol in protocol.owl, which contains localities alice, bob, and charlie. The steps are as follows:

1. cabal run owl -- -e path/to/protocol.owl
   This should print Successfully extracted to file extraction/src/main.rs
2. cd extraction
3. cargo run -- config .
   This should output one .owl_config file for each of the localities in the protocol (in this example, loc_alice.owl_config, loc_bob.owl_config, loc_charlie.owl_config). These files contain all the pre-initialized names for the protocol (such as pre-shared symmetric keys, public keys for other localities, shared salt for the KDF, etc).
4. Open one shell for each of the localities in the protocol (in this example, three shells). In all of them, cd to the extraction subdirectory.
5. In each of the shells, run cargo run -- run LOCALITY PATH-TO-LOCALITY-CONFIG. In this example, you would run:
   • Shell 1: cargo run -- run alice loc_alice.owl_config
   • Shell 2: cargo run -- run bob loc_bob.owl_config
   • Shell 3: cargo run -- run charlie loc_charlie.owl_config
     These should all be started within 5 seconds of each other. The extraction harness waits 5 seconds before beginning execution of the locality; this is to ensure that the user has time to start the other localities. Otherwise, the protocol code may fail because another locality's TCP socket is not ready to receive yet.
6. You should see the return values of each of the localities printed in their corresponding shells.

Syntax highlighting

Vim

Add the following to your vimrc:

set runtimepath+=$OWL_HOME/vim

where $OWL_HOME is set accordingly.

VSCode

See vscode/README.md for details.

Related Publications

Joshua Gancher, Sydney Gibson, Pratap Singh, Samvid Dharanikota, & Bryan Parno. (2023). Owl: Compositional Verification of Security Protocols via an Information-Flow Type System.

Supported Cryptographic Operations

Owl currently supports the following cryptographic primitives:

• Authenticated Symmetric Encryption (e.g., ChaCha20-Poly1305, or AES-GCM)
• CCA-secure PKE (e.g., RSA with OAEP)
• Message Authentication Codes (e.g., HMAC)
• Digital Signatures (e.g., RSA siagnatures)
• Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange
• HKDF for key derivations
• Unique Nonces for checking equality