Descrizione del progetto
Compilatori sicuri per linguaggi di programmazione realistici
Le catene di compilazione odierne non sono sicure, il che porta a molte e gravi vulnerabilità nei sistemi informatici. Tuttavia, una compilazione sicura sarebbe difficile da ottenere utilizzando i grossolani meccanismi di protezione forniti dalle architetture hardware tradizionali. Finanziato dal Consiglio europeo della ricerca, il progetto SECOMP intende sfruttare le emergenti architetture taggate al fine di sviluppare le prime catene di compilazione sicure ed efficienti per linguaggi di programmazione realistici, come C ed F*. Per raggiungere un livello di sicurezza senza precedenti che ispiri grande fiducia, il progetto definirà matematicamente cosa significa compilare applicazioni compartimentate in modo sicuro. Inoltre, si verificherà che le catene di compilazione sviluppate soddisfino questa definizione formale di sicurezza utilizzando una combinazione di prove controllate in modo automatico e test basati sulle proprietà.
Obiettivo
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.
Campo scientifico
Parole chiave
Programma(i)
Argomento(i)
Meccanismo di finanziamento
ERC-STG - Starting GrantIstituzione ospitante
80539 Munchen
Germania