Write a Blog >>
POPL 2021
Sun 17 - Fri 22 January 2021 Online
Sun 17 Jan 2021 21:15 - 21:30 at PriSC - Short talks Chair(s): Deian Stefan

Microarchitectural attacks exploit the abstraction gap between the Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) and how instructions are actually executed by processors to compromise the confidentiality and integrity of a system.

To secure systems against microarchitectural attacks, programmers need to reason about and program against these microarchitectural side-effects. However, we cannot—and should not—expect programmers to manually tailor programs for specific processors and their security guarantees.

Instead, we could rely on compilers (and the secure compilation community), as they can play a prominent role in bridging this gap: compilers should target specific processors microarchitectural security guarantees and they should leverage these guarantees to produce secure code.

To achieve this, we outline the idea of Contract-Aware Secure COmpilation (CASCO) where compilers are parametric with respect to a hardware/software security-contract, an abstraction capturing a processor’s security guarantees. That is, compilers will automatically leverage the guarantees formalized in the contract to ensure that program-level security properties are preserved at microarchitectural level.

Sun 17 Jan

Displayed time zone: Amsterdam, Berlin, Bern, Rome, Stockholm, Vienna change

21:00 - 21:30
Short talksPriSC at PriSC
Chair(s): Deian Stefan University of California at San Diego, USA
21:00
15m
Talk
A Categorical Approach to Secure Compilation (and others things) (short talk)
PriSC
Stelios Tsampas , Andreas Nuyts KU Leuven, Belgium, Dominique Devriese Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Frank Piessens KU Leuven
21:15
15m
Talk
Contract-aware Secure Compilation (short talk)
PriSC
Marco Guarnieri ETH Zurich, Switzerland, Marco Patrignani Stanford University, USA / CISPA, Germany
Pre-print