A Formal Approach to Secure Speculation
Kevin Cheang, Cameron Rasmussen, Sanjit A. Seshia, and Pramod Subramanyan. A Formal Approach to Secure Speculation. In Proceedings of the Computer Security Foundations Symposium (CSF), June 2019.
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Abstract
Transient execution attacks like Spectre, Meltdown and Foreshadow have shown that combinations of microarchitectural side-channels can be exploited to create side-channel leaks that are greater than the sum of their parts. While both hardware and software mitigations have been proposed against these attacks, provable security has remained elusive. This paper introduces a formal methodology for enabling secure speculative execution on modern processors. We propose a new class of information flow security properties called trace property-dependent observational determinism (TPOD). We use this class to formulate a secure speculation property. Our property formulation and associated adversary models help formalize the class of transient execution vulnerabilities. We demonstrate applicability of our methodology by verifying secure speculation for several illustrative programs.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{cheang-csf19, author = {Kevin Cheang and Cameron Rasmussen and Sanjit A. Seshia and Pramod Subramanyan}, title = {A Formal Approach to Secure Speculation}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the Computer Security Foundations Symposium (CSF)}, year = {2019}, abstract = {Transient execution attacks like Spectre, Meltdown and Foreshadow have shown that combinations of microarchitectural side-channels can be exploited to create side-channel leaks that are greater than the sum of their parts. While both hardware and software mitigations have been proposed against these attacks, provable security has remained elusive. This paper introduces a formal methodology for enabling secure speculative execution on modern processors. We propose a new class of information flow security properties called trace property-dependent observational determinism (TPOD). We use this class to formulate a secure speculation property. Our property formulation and associated adversary models help formalize the class of transient execution vulnerabilities. We demonstrate applicability of our methodology by verifying secure speculation for several illustrative programs.}, }