Proving full-system security properties under multiple attacker models on capability machines


Thomas Van Strydonck, Aïna Linn Georges, Armaël Guéneau, Alix Trieu, Amin Timany, Frank Piessens, Lars Birkedal, and Dominique Devriese: Proving full-system security properties under multiple attacker models on capability machines. In CSF 2021, August 2022. https://doi.org/10.1109/CSF54842.2022.9919645
Conference Paper
Abstract.

Assembly-level protection mechanisms (virtual mem-ory, trusted execution environments, virtualization) make it possible to guarantee security properties of a full system in the presence of arbitrary attacker provided code. However, they typically only support a single trust boundary: code is either trusted or untrusted, and protection cannot be nested. Capability machines provide protection mechanisms that are more fine-grained and that do support arbitrary nesting of protection. We show in this paper how this enables the formal verification of full-system security properties under multiple attacker models: differ-ent security objectives of the full system can be verified under a different choice of trust boundary (i.e. under a different attacker model). The verification approach we propose is modular, and is robust: code outside the trust boundary for a given security objective can be arbitrary, unverified attacker-provided code. It is based on the use of universal contracts for untrusted adversarial code: sound, conservative contracts which can be combined with manual verification of trusted components in a compositional program logic. Compositionality of the program logic also allows us to reuse common parts in the analyses for different attacker models. We instantiate the approach concretely by extending an existing capability machine model with support for memory-mapped I/O and we obtain full system, machine-verified security properties about external effect traces while limiting the manual verification effort to a small trusted computing base relevant for the specific property under study.

The bibtex source for this publication:
@inproceedings{DBLP:conf/csfw/StrydonckGGTTPB22,
 author = {Thomas Van Strydonck and
  A{\"{\i}}na Linn Georges and
  Arma{\"{e}}l Gu{\'{e}}neau and
  Alix Trieu and
  Amin Timany and
  Frank Piessens and
  Lars Birkedal and
  Dominique Devriese},
 title = {Proving full-system security properties under multiple attacker models
  on capability machines},
 booktitle  = {35th {IEEE} Computer Security Foundations Symposium, {CSF} 2022, Haifa,
  Israel, August 7-10, 2022},
 pages = {80--95},
 publisher = {{IEEE}},
 year = {2022},
 url = {https://doi.org/10.1109/CSF54842.2022.9919645},
 doi = {10.1109/CSF54842.2022.9919645},
 timestamp    = {Tue, 21 Mar 2023 21:02:09 +0100},
 biburl       = {https://dblp.org/rec/conf/csfw/StrydonckGGTTPB22.bib},
 bibsource    = {dblp computer science bibliography, https://dblp.org}
}