Skip to main content
EnglishEN
European Commission logo print header

Efficient Formally Secure Compilers to a Tagged Architecture

Project description

DEENESFRITPL

Secure compilers for realistic programming languages

Today's compilation chains are non-secure, which results in numerous severe vulnerabilities in computer systems. Yet, secure compilation would be difficult to achieve using the coarse-grained protection mechanisms provided by mainstream hardware architectures. Funded by the European Research Council, the SECOMP project aims to leverage emerging tagged architectures in order to develop the first efficient secure compilation chains for realistic programming languages, such as C and F*. To achieve an unprecedented level of security and provide high confidence for it, the project will mathematically define what it means for compartmentalised applications to be compiled securely. Moreover, it will verify that the developed compilation chains satisfy this formal security definition using a combination of machine-checked proofs and property-based testing.

Objective

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.

Fields of science

Keywords

Programme(s)

Topic(s)

Call for proposal

ERC-2016-STG

See other projects for this call

Funding Scheme

ERC-STG - Starting Grant

Host institution

MAX-PLANCK-GESELLSCHAFT ZUR FORDERUNG DER WISSENSCHAFTEN EV
Net EU contribution
€ 368 220,25
Address
HOFGARTENSTRASSE 8
80539 Munchen
Germany

See on map
Region
Bayern Oberbayern München, Kreisfreie Stadt
Activity type
Research Organisations
Links
Total cost
€ 368 220,25

Beneficiaries (2)

Share this page

Download

Last update: 23 October 2023

My Booklet

Permalink: https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/715753

European Union, 2024