Formally Verified Security

This project is aimed at leveraging emerging hardware capabilities for fine-grained protection to build the first, efficient secure compilation chains for realistic low-level programming languages (the C language, and Low* a safe subset of C embedded in F* for verification). These compilation chains 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 compilation chains target a tagged architecture, which associates a metadata tag to each word and efficiently propagates and checks tags according to software-defined rules. We are using property-based testing and formal verification to provide high confidence that our compilation chains are indeed secure. Formally, we are constructing machine-checked proofs in Coq of various new security criteria, which are defined as the preservation of property classes even against an adversarial context.  These strong criteria complement compiler correctness and ensure that no machine-code attacker can do more harm to securely compiled components than a component already could with respect to a secure source-level semantics.