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Security-preserving compilers generate compiled code that withstands target-level attacks such as alteration of control flow, data leaks, or memory corruption. Many existing security-preserving compilers are proven to be fully abstract, meaning that they reflect and preserve observational equivalence. Fully abstract compilation is strong and useful but, in certain cases, comes at the cost of requiring expensive runtime constructs in compiled code. These constructs may have no relevance for security, but are needed to accommodate differences between the source and target languages that fully abstract compilation necessarily needs.

As an alternative to fully abstract compilation, this article explores a different criterion for secure compilation called robustly safe compilation or RSC. Briefly, this criterion means that the compiled code preserves relevant safety properties of the source program against all adversarial …