Project description
Solution for the prevention of transient execution attacks
Cybersecurity is crucial in an increasingly digitalised society. The transition to digital formats for government and organisational data, combined with the growing complexity of new hardware and software, has heightened the risks and challenges of defending systems, especially with the rise of transient execution attacks that exploit vulnerable code despite mitigations. The ERC-funded Ghostbuster project aims to research solutions to counter transient execution attacks. The project plans to take a principled approach to understanding these attacks and the conditions that enable them, and then to develop strategies for informing and mitigating the issue.
Objective
Ghostbuster is a research program to stop advanced transient execution attacks, which by themselves already rank among the most advanced attacks everby finding vulnerable code fragments, analyzing them for exploitability, and injecting mitigations where needed. The vulnerabilities such as Spectre, Meltdown and others originate in vulnerable hardware and allow data leakage across all security boundaries. Recently, my team and I showed that even more advanced attacks exist by combining transient execution with traditional software exploitation. Today, we have no way of even detecting these hybrid attacks, let alone stop them. While we keep finding new variants, vendors have indicated that they cannot fix them all, as it would cripple performance. The hope is that developers identify and harden vulnerable code snippets (e.g. with instructions that stop transient execution). Unfortunately, finding vulnerable snippets is hard, beyond the abilities of top programmers, and even more so for the new hybrid attacks. Can it be done automatically?
The challenge is daunting and involves all interaction between the code and a myriad of obscure CPU resources, requiring expertise in hardware, operating systems, fuzzing, program analysis, etc. State-of-the-art (and limited) tools do not even aim for mitigation and simply report potential issueswith many false positives and negatives.
Unlike existing solutions that detect the snippets through pattern matching, Ghostbuster takes a principled approach and considers the fundamental conditions enabling attackswithout resorting to, say, symbolic execution, which scales poorly to large programs. It models the fundamental conditions of (steps of) an attack in terms of control + dataflow properties and translates the models into detectors. After detecting the code that looks vulnerable, it runs additional (possibly heavy-weight) exploitability analysis and, if need be, mitigates the issue by removing some of the enabling conditions
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- natural sciences computer and information sciences software
- engineering and technology electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering electronic engineering computer hardware computer processors
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Keywords
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
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Topic(s)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Funding Scheme
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
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Call for proposal
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Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) ERC-2023-ADG
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1081 HV Amsterdam
Netherlands
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