Paper 2026/899

VCVio: Verified Cryptography in Lean via Oracle Effects and Handlers

Quang Dao, Carnegie Mellon University

James Waters, Carnegie Mellon University

Alexander Hicks, Ethereum Foundation

Nicholas Hopper, University of Minnesota

Abstract

Mechanized cryptographic proofs face a long-standing trade-off between assurance and expressiveness. Existing foundational frameworks, which reduce every proof step to the kernel of a general-purpose proof assistant, offer a small, auditable trusted base, but struggle to model the oracle manipulations and rewinding arguments pervasive in modern cryptography. They also tend to lack the tactic infrastructure of specialized, non-foundational tools like EasyCrypt. We present VCVio, a foundational framework in Lean 4 that closes both gaps with established ideas from programming-language theory: algebraic effects and handlers on the oracle side, and a modular relational program logic on the tactic side. Concretely, a computation with oracle access is the free monad over the polynomial functor determined by the oracle specification, exposing its interaction history as an explicit syntax tree. Caching, logging, reprogramming, and seed pre-sampling become handler combinators; rewinding reduces to deterministic transcript replay without any internal adversary state. On top of the oracle core, VCVio provides two reusable layers. We extend the recent Loom framework (POPL 2026) to the relational setting, yielding a single tactic framework that handles both unary and relational probabilistic reasoning. Alongside this, our treatment of state-separating proofs achieves compositional separation by typing, whereas Nominal SSProve recovers it by quotienting locations modulo alpha equivalence. We exercise this stack on three case studies: a random-oracle commitment scheme; the Bellare--Neven forking lemma, mechanized without the rewindability axioms used in the recent EasyCrypt formalization by Firsov and Janků; and the Schnorr signature scheme establishing EUF-CMA security. A significant share of our development used LLM coding agents and external automated proof-search systems; we report on the workflows, successes, and failure modes as a data point in LLM-assisted theorem proving.

@misc{cryptoeprint:2026/899,
      author = {Devon Tuma and Quang Dao and James Waters and Alexander Hicks and Nicholas Hopper},
      title = {{VCVio}: Verified Cryptography in Lean via Oracle Effects and Handlers},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2026/899},
      year = {2026},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2026/899}
}