Summary
Severe low-level vulnerabilities abound in today’s computer systems, allowing cyber-attackers to remotely gain
full control. This happens in big part because our programming languages, compilers, and architectures were
designed in an era of scarce hardware resources and too often trade off security for efficiency. The semantics of
mainstream low-level languages like C is inherently insecure, and even for safer languages, establishing security
with respect to a high-level semantics does not guarantee the absence of low-level attacks. Secure compilation
using the coarse-grained protection mechanisms provided by mainstream hardware architectures would be too
inefficient for most practical scenarios. This project is aimed at leveraging emerging hardware capabilities
for fine-grained protection to build the first, efficient secure compilers for realistic programming languages,
both low-level (the C language) and high-level (ML and a dependently-typed variant). These compilers will
provide a secure semantics for all programs and will ensure that high-level abstractions cannot be violated
even when interacting with untrusted low-level code. To achieve this level of security without sacrificing
efficiency, our secure compilers will target a tagged architecture, which associates a metadata tag to each word
and efficiently propagates and checks tags according to software-defined rules. We will experimentally evaluate
and carefully optimize the efficiency of our secure compilers on realistic workloads and standard benchmark
suites. We will use property-based testing and formal verification to provide high confidence that our compilers
are indeed secure. Formally, we will construct machine-checked proofs of full abstraction with respect to
a secure high-level semantics. This strong property complements compiler correctness and ensures that no
machine-code attacker can do more harm to securely compiled components than a component in the secure
source language already could.
full control. This happens in big part because our programming languages, compilers, and architectures were
designed in an era of scarce hardware resources and too often trade off security for efficiency. The semantics of
mainstream low-level languages like C is inherently insecure, and even for safer languages, establishing security
with respect to a high-level semantics does not guarantee the absence of low-level attacks. Secure compilation
using the coarse-grained protection mechanisms provided by mainstream hardware architectures would be too
inefficient for most practical scenarios. This project is aimed at leveraging emerging hardware capabilities
for fine-grained protection to build the first, efficient secure compilers for realistic programming languages,
both low-level (the C language) and high-level (ML and a dependently-typed variant). These compilers will
provide a secure semantics for all programs and will ensure that high-level abstractions cannot be violated
even when interacting with untrusted low-level code. To achieve this level of security without sacrificing
efficiency, our secure compilers will target a tagged architecture, which associates a metadata tag to each word
and efficiently propagates and checks tags according to software-defined rules. We will experimentally evaluate
and carefully optimize the efficiency of our secure compilers on realistic workloads and standard benchmark
suites. We will use property-based testing and formal verification to provide high confidence that our compilers
are indeed secure. Formally, we will construct machine-checked proofs of full abstraction with respect to
a secure high-level semantics. This strong property complements compiler correctness and ensures that no
machine-code attacker can do more harm to securely compiled components than a component in the secure
source language already could.
Unfold all
/
Fold all
More information & hyperlinks
| Web resources: | https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/715753 |
| Start date: | 01-01-2017 |
| End date: | 31-12-2021 |
| Total budget - Public funding: | 1 498 444,00 Euro - 1 498 444,00 Euro |
Cordis data
Original description
Severe low-level vulnerabilities abound in today’s computer systems, allowing cyber-attackers to remotely gainfull control. This happens in big part because our programming languages, compilers, and architectures were
designed in an era of scarce hardware resources and too often trade off security for efficiency. The semantics of
mainstream low-level languages like C is inherently insecure, and even for safer languages, establishing security
with respect to a high-level semantics does not guarantee the absence of low-level attacks. Secure compilation
using the coarse-grained protection mechanisms provided by mainstream hardware architectures would be too
inefficient for most practical scenarios. This project is aimed at leveraging emerging hardware capabilities
for fine-grained protection to build the first, efficient secure compilers for realistic programming languages,
both low-level (the C language) and high-level (ML and a dependently-typed variant). These compilers will
provide a secure semantics for all programs and will ensure that high-level abstractions cannot be violated
even when interacting with untrusted low-level code. To achieve this level of security without sacrificing
efficiency, our secure compilers will target a tagged architecture, which associates a metadata tag to each word
and efficiently propagates and checks tags according to software-defined rules. We will experimentally evaluate
and carefully optimize the efficiency of our secure compilers on realistic workloads and standard benchmark
suites. We will use property-based testing and formal verification to provide high confidence that our compilers
are indeed secure. Formally, we will construct machine-checked proofs of full abstraction with respect to
a secure high-level semantics. This strong property complements compiler correctness and ensures that no
machine-code attacker can do more harm to securely compiled components than a component in the secure
source language already could.
Status
CLOSEDCall topic
ERC-2016-STGUpdate Date
27-04-2024
Images
No images available.
Geographical location(s)
