Sponsor
This work is in part supported by ERC Starting Grant SECOMP (715753), by NSF award 1513854, Micro-Policies: A Framework for Tag-Based Security Monitors and by DARPA’s System Security Integrated Through Hardware and Firmware (SSITH) program.
Document Type
Pre-Print
Publication Date
2-2018
Subjects
Cryptography, Computer security, Programming languages (Computers)
Abstract
We propose a new formal criterion for secure compilation, giving strong end-to-end security guarantees for software components written in unsafe, low-level languages with C-style undefined behavior. Our criterion is the first to model dynamic compromise in a system of mutually distrustful components running with least privilege. Each component is protected from all the others—in particular, from components that have encountered undefined behavior and become compromised. Each component receives secure compilation guarantees up to the point when it becomes compromised, after which an attacker can take complete control over the component and use any of its privileges to attack the remaining uncompromised components. More precisely, we ensure that dynamically compromised components cannot break the safety properties of the system at the target level any more than equally privileged components without undefined behavior already could in the source language.
To illustrate this model, we build a secure compilation chain for an unsafe language with buffers, procedures, and components. We compile it to a simple RISC abstract machine with builtin compartmentalization and provide thorough proofs, many of them machine-checked in Coq, showing that the compiler satisfies our secure compilation criterion. Finally, we show that the protection guarantees offered by the compartmentalized abstract machine can be achieved at the machine-code level using either software fault isolation or a tag-based reference monitor.
Persistent Identifier
http://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/24232
Citation Details
Fachini, Guglielmo, Catalin Hritcu, Marco Stronati, Arthur Azevedo de Amorim, Ana Nora Evans, Carmine Abate, Roberto Blanco, Théo Laurent, Benjamin C. Pierce, and Andrew Tolmach. "When Good Components Go Bad: Formally Secure Compilation Despite Dynamic Compromise." arXiv preprint arXiv:1802.00588 (2018).