Security Reasoning via Substructural Dependency Tracking

Substructural type systems provide the ability to speak about resources . By enforcing usage restrictions on inputs to computations they allow programmers to reify limited system units—such as memory—in types. We demonstrate a new form of resource reasoning founded on constraining outputs and explore its utility for practical programming. In particular, we identify a number of disparate programming features explored largely in the security literature as various fragments of our unified framework. These encompass capabilities, quantitative information leakage, sandboxing in the style of the Linux seccomp interface, authorization protocols, and more. We furthermore explore its connection to conventional input-based resource reasoning, casting it as an internal treatment of the constructive Kripke semantics of substructural logics. We verify the capability , quantity , and protocol safety of our system through a single logical relations argument. In doing so, we take the first steps towards obtaining the ultimate multitool for security reasoning.

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Publication Details

Journal
Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages
Published
2026-01-08
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1145/3776669
Primary Topic
Security and Verification in Computing
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
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article

Security Reasoning via Substructural Dependency Tracking

Hemant Gouni, Jonathan S. Aldrich, Frank Pfenning
Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages
Security and Verification in Computing
article

Security Reasoning via Substructural Dependency Tracking

Hemant Gouni, Jonathan S. Aldrich, Frank Pfenning
article en

Abstract

Substructural type systems provide the ability to speak about resources . By enforcing usage restrictions on inputs to computations they allow programmers to reify limited system units—such as memory—in types. We demonstrate a new form of resource reasoning founded on constraining outputs and explore its utility for practical programming. In particular, we identify a number of disparate programming features explored largely in the security literature as various fragments of our unified framework. These encompass capabilities, quantitative information leakage, sandboxing in the style of the Linux seccomp interface, authorization protocols, and more. We furthermore explore its connection to conventional input-based resource reasoning, casting it as an internal treatment of the constructive Kripke semantics of substructural logics. We verify the capability , quantity , and protocol safety of our system through a single logical relations argument. In doing so, we take the first steps towards obtaining the ultimate multitool for security reasoning.

Proceedings of the ACM on Programming LanguagesVol. 10(POPL)
Carnegie Mellon University (US)
Openalex Percentile: Top 93%
Security and Verification in Computing
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Security Reasoning via Substructural Dependency Tracking — Hemant Gouni, Jonathan S. Aldrich, et al. · Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages (2026) | TGRS Research Map | TGRS