English

Build-Authorized Evidence for Opaque Calls: A Fail-Closed Rewrite-Authority Boundary

Programming Languages 2026-07-21 v1

Abstract

Detached semantic facts about opaque native providers do not by themselves justify compiler rewrites: rewrite authority must be confined to the accepted fact, selected provider and build, caller, callback environment, observation, and runtime target. We present a build-authorized path-effect interface that enforces this boundary through fail-closed authorization and link receipts. The design separates receipt closure, callback-environment closure, and projection identity, and passes accepted facts to LLVM through a narrow internal API. We use one-hop topology-load reuse as a minimal observable witness of authority, not as the optimization target. A conservative LLVM consumer reuses a pointer observation only from a noalias root or one constant nonzero projection. Rocq models prove conditional refinement and authority non-amplification under explicit effect, alias, compiler/ABI, and target-resolution premises. We instantiate checked production with Toka: a source-summary gate emits exact LLVM IR, a separate IR checker accepts only a bounded topology-preserving subset, and only accepted IR is compiled into the receipt-bound provider object. A bounded static Darwin/arm64 profile also checks the final direct branch target. Across issuer-declared readv, recvmsg, and Cairo boundaries, authorized IR retains each opaque call, reduces the relevant loads from two to one, and preserves observed results; mismatched providers, builds, callbacks, projections, and unsupported IR remain neutral. A libjpeg case is rejected because its callback environment is open, while a bound callback singleton demonstrates the supported closure rule. The contribution is a checked deployment-compiler boundary with an explicit trust and applicability frontier, not a uniquely expressive effect encoding or a new load-elimination algorithm.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2607.18949,
  title  = {Build-Authorized Evidence for Opaque Calls: A Fail-Closed Rewrite-Authority Boundary},
  author = {Zhonghua Yi},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.18949},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

38 pages, 1 figure, 16 tables; includes a public appendix