Previous work on rewriting and reachability logic establishes a vision for a language-agnostic program verifier, which takes three inputs: a program, its formal specification, and the formal semantics of the programming language in which the program is written. The verifier then uses a language-agnostic verification algorithm to prove the program correct with respect to the specification and the formal language semantics. Such a complex verifier can easily have bugs. This paper proposes a method to certify the correctness of each successful verification run by generating a proof certificate. The proof certificate can be checked by a small proof checker. The preliminary experiments apply the method to generate proof certificates for program verification in an imperative language, a functional language, and an assembly language, showing that the proposed method is language-agnostic.

@article{paperbot2043,
  title = {Generating Proof Certificates for a Language-Agnostic Deductive Program Verifier},
  author = {Zhengyao Lin and Xiaohong Chen and Minh-Thai Trinh and John Wang and Grigore Roşu},
  journal = {Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages},
  volume = {7},
  number = {OOPSLA1},
  year = {2023},
  doi = {10.1145/3586029}
}