Event-based Compositional Reasoning of Information-Flow Security for Concurrent Systems

High assurance of information-flow security (IFS) for concurrent systems is challenging. A promising way for formal verification of concurrent systems is the rely-guarantee method. However, existing compositional reasoning approaches for IFS concentrate on language-based IFS. It is often not applicable for system-level security, such as multicore operating system kernels, in which secrecy of actions should also be considered. On the other hand, existing studies on the rely-guarantee method are basically built on concurrent programming languages, by which semantics of concurrent systems cannot be completely captured in a straightforward way. In order to formally verify state-action based IFS for concurrent systems, we propose a rely-guarantee-based compositional reasoning approach for IFS in this paper. We first design a language by incorporating ``Event'' into concurrent languages and give the IFS semantics of the language. As a primitive element, events offer an extremely neat framework for modeling system and are not necessarily atomic in our language. For compositional reasoning of IFS, we use rely-guarantee specification to define new forms of unwinding conditions (UCs) on events, i.e., event UCs. By a rely-guarantee proof system of the language and the soundness of event UCs, we have that event UCs imply IFS of concurrent systems. In such a way, we relax the atomicity constraint of actions in traditional UCs and provide a compositional reasoning way for IFS in which security proof of systems can be discharged by independent security proof on individual events. Finally, we mechanize the approach in Isabelle/HOL and develop a formal specification and its IFS proof for multicore separation kernels as a study case according to an industrial standard -- ARINC 653

A Survey of Techniques for Improving Security of GPUs

Graphics processing unit (GPU), although a powerful performance-booster, also has many security vulnerabilities. Due to these, the GPU can act as a safe-haven for stealthy malware and the weakest `link' in the security `chain'. In this paper, we present a survey of techniques for analyzing and improving GPU security. We classify the works on key attributes to highlight their similarities and differences. More than informing users and researchers about GPU security techniques, this survey aims to increase their awareness about GPU security vulnerabilities and potential countermeasures

Proving the Absence of Microarchitectural Timing Channels

Microarchitectural timing channels are a major threat to computer security. A set of OS mechanisms called time protection was recently proposed as a principled way of preventing information leakage through such channels and prototyped in the seL4 microkernel. We formalise time protection and the underlying hardware mechanisms in a way that allows linking them to the information-flow proofs that showed the absence of storage channels in seL4.Comment: Scott Buckley and Robert Sison were joint lead author

Modelling information routing with noninterference

To achieve the highest levels of assurance, MILS architectures need to be formally analysed. A key challenge is to reason about the interaction between the software applications running on top of MILS core components, such as the separation kernel. In this paper, we extend Rushby's model of noninterference with explicit information units and domain programs. These extensions enable the reasoning at an abstract level about systems built on top of noninterference. As an illustration of our approach, we formally model and analyse an example inspired by the GWV Firewall. <br/

Towards a formally designed and verified embedded operating system: case study using the B method

The dramatic growth in practical applications for iris biometrics has been accompanied by relevant developments in the underlying algorithms and techniques. Along with the research focused on near-infrared images captured with subject cooperation, e orts are being made to minimize the trade-o between the quality of the captured data and the recognition accuracy on less constrained environments, where images are obtained at the visible wavelength, at increased distances, over simpli ed acquisition protocols and adverse lightning conditions. At a rst stage, interpolation e ects on normalization process are addressed, pointing the outcomes in the overall recognition error rates. Secondly, a couple of post-processing steps to the Daugman's approach are performed, attempting to increase its performance in the particular unconstrained environments this thesis assumes. Analysis on both frequency and spatial domains and nally pattern recognition methods are applied in such e orts. This thesis embodies the study on how subject recognition can be achieved, without his cooperation, making use of iris data captured at-a-distance, on-the-move and at visible wavelength conditions. Widely used methods designed for constrained scenarios are analyzed

Outsmarting Network Security with SDN Teleportation

Software-defined networking is considered a promising new paradigm, enabling more reliable and formally verifiable communication networks. However, this paper shows that the separation of the control plane from the data plane, which lies at the heart of Software-Defined Networks (SDNs), introduces a new vulnerability which we call \emph{teleportation}. An attacker (e.g., a malicious switch in the data plane or a host connected to the network) can use teleportation to transmit information via the control plane and bypass critical network functions in the data plane (e.g., a firewall), and to violate security policies as well as logical and even physical separations. This paper characterizes the design space for teleportation attacks theoretically, and then identifies four different teleportation techniques. We demonstrate and discuss how these techniques can be exploited for different attacks (e.g., exfiltrating confidential data at high rates), and also initiate the discussion of possible countermeasures. Generally, and given today's trend toward more intent-based networking, we believe that our findings are relevant beyond the use cases considered in this paper.Comment: Accepted in EuroSP'1