Cryptographic primitives need high-speed implementations that are also resistant to side channel attacks. The absolute control over instructions and registers that such implementations demand makes assembly language programming a necessity. In this article, we describe Verse, a typed low-level language embedded in Coq designed specifically to generate assembly language programs for cryptographic primitives. Despite being a low-level language, the programming experience is markedly high-level: • The type system of Verse is rich enough to even prevent errors in array indexing and endian conversion. • Being embedded in Coq, we have at our disposal Gallina, the underlying functional programming language, as a macro assembler for code generation, and Ltac, the tactic language, as an automation tool for proof obligations inherent to our type system. We also provide a generic framework to formulate semantic aspects of Verse. This framework has value beyond providing an interpretation of Verse in Coq. We demonstrate this versatility by using it to localise uninitialised/clobbered variable use, and arithmetic overflows. © 2018 Association for Computing Machinery.