Formally Verified Security
- Catalin Hritcu (Tenured Faculty)
- Carmine Abate (PhD Student)
- Jérémy Thibault (PhD Student)
- Roberto Blanco (Postdoctoral Researcher)
- Adrien Durier (Postdoctoral Researcher)
- Théo Winterhalter (Postdoctoral Researcher)
- Cezar Constantin Andrici (Research Engineer / Intern)
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.
- Carmine Abate, Roberto Blanco, Ștefan Ciobâcă, Deepak Garg, Cătălin Hriţcu, Marco Patrignani, Éric Tanter, and Jérémy Thibault. Trace-Relating Compiler Correctness and Secure Compilation. arXiv:1907.05320. July 2019.
- Carmine Abate, Roberto Blanco, Deepak Garg, Cătălin Hriţcu, Marco Patrignani, and Jérémy Thibault. Journey Beyond Full Abstraction: Exploring Robust Property Preservation for Secure Compilation. In 32nd IEEE Computer Security Foundations Symposium (CSF), June 2019. Distinguished Paper Award.
- Carmine Abate, Arthur Azevedo de Amorim, Roberto Blanco, Ana Nora Evans, Guglielmo Fachini, Cătălin Hriţcu, Théo Laurent, Benjamin C. Pierce, Marco Stronati, and Andrew Tolmach. When Good Components Go Bad: Formally Secure Compilation Despite Dynamic Compromise. In 25th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), October 2018.
F*'s type system includes dependent types, monadic effects, refinement types, and a weakest precondition calculus. Together, these features allow expressing precise and compact specifications for programs. The F* type-checker aims to prove that programs meet their specifications using a combination of SMT solving and interactive proofs.
- Dijkstra Monads for All (Kenji Maillard, Danel Ahman, Robert Atkey, Guido Martínez, Catalin Hritcu, Exequiel Rivas, Éric Tanter), In 24th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming (ICFP), 2019.
- Recalling a Witness: Foundations and Applications of Monotonic State (Danel Ahman, Cédric Fournet, Catalin Hritcu, Kenji Maillard, Aseem Rastogi, Nikhil Swamy), In PACMPL, volume 2, 2018.
- Dependent Types and Multi-Monadic Effects in F* (Nikhil Swamy, Catalin Hritcu, Chantal Keller, Aseem Rastogi, Antoine Delignat-Lavaud, Simon Forest, Karthikeyan Bhargavan, Cédric Fournet, Pierre-Yves Strub, Markulf Kohlweiss, Jean-Karim Zinzindohoué, Santiago Zanella-Béguelin), In 43rd ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL), ACM, 2016.