34,583 research outputs found
Scheduler-specific Confidentiality for Multi-Threaded Programs and Its Logic-Based Verification
Observational determinism has been proposed in the literature as a way to ensure confidentiality for multi-threaded programs. Intuitively, a program is observationally deterministic if the behavior of the public variables is deterministic, i.e., independent of the private variables and the scheduling policy. Several formal definitions of observational determinism exist, but all of them have shortcomings; for example they accept insecure programs or they reject too many innocuous programs. Besides, the role of schedulers was ignored in all the proposed definitions. A program that is secure under one kind of scheduler might not be secure when executed with a different scheduler. The existing definitions do not ensure that an accepted program behaves securely under the scheduler that is used to deploy the program. Therefore, this paper proposes a new formalization of scheduler-specific observational determinism. It accepts programs that are secure when executed under a specific scheduler. Moreover, it is less restrictive on harmless programs under a particular scheduling policy. In addition, we discuss how compliance with our definition can be verified, using model checking. We use the idea of self-composition and we rephrase the observational determinism property for a single program as a temporal logic formula over the program executed in parallel with an independent copy of itself. Thus two states reachable during the execution of are combined into a reachable program state of the self-composed program. This allows to compare two program executions in a single temporal logic formula. The actual characterization is done in two steps. First we discuss how stuttering equivalence can be characterized as a temporal logic formula. Observational determinism is then expressed in terms of the stuttering equivalence characterization. This results in a conjunction of an LTL and a CTL formula, that are amenable to model checking
Complexity Information Flow in a Multi-threaded Imperative Language
We propose a type system to analyze the time consumed by multi-threaded
imperative programs with a shared global memory, which delineates a class of
safe multi-threaded programs. We demonstrate that a safe multi-threaded program
runs in polynomial time if (i) it is strongly terminating wrt a
non-deterministic scheduling policy or (ii) it terminates wrt a deterministic
and quiet scheduling policy. As a consequence, we also characterize the set of
polynomial time functions. The type system presented is based on the
fundamental notion of data tiering, which is central in implicit computational
complexity. It regulates the information flow in a computation. This aspect is
interesting in that the type system bears a resemblance to typed based
information flow analysis and notions of non-interference. As far as we know,
this is the first characterization by a type system of polynomial time
multi-threaded programs
CONFLLVM: A Compiler for Enforcing Data Confidentiality in Low-Level Code
We present an instrumenting compiler for enforcing data confidentiality in
low-level applications (e.g. those written in C) in the presence of an active
adversary. In our approach, the programmer marks secret data by writing
lightweight annotations on top-level definitions in the source code. The
compiler then uses a static flow analysis coupled with efficient runtime
instrumentation, a custom memory layout, and custom control-flow integrity
checks to prevent data leaks even in the presence of low-level attacks. We have
implemented our scheme as part of the LLVM compiler. We evaluate it on the SPEC
micro-benchmarks for performance, and on larger, real-world applications
(including OpenLDAP, which is around 300KLoC) for programmer overhead required
to restructure the application when protecting the sensitive data such as
passwords. We find that performance overheads introduced by our instrumentation
are moderate (average 12% on SPEC), and the programmer effort to port OpenLDAP
is only about 160 LoC.Comment: Technical report for CONFLLVM: A Compiler for Enforcing Data
Confidentiality in Low-Level Code, appearing at EuroSys 201
A Verified Information-Flow Architecture
SAFE is a clean-slate design for a highly secure computer system, with
pervasive mechanisms for tracking and limiting information flows. At the lowest
level, the SAFE hardware supports fine-grained programmable tags, with
efficient and flexible propagation and combination of tags as instructions are
executed. The operating system virtualizes these generic facilities to present
an information-flow abstract machine that allows user programs to label
sensitive data with rich confidentiality policies. We present a formal,
machine-checked model of the key hardware and software mechanisms used to
dynamically control information flow in SAFE and an end-to-end proof of
noninterference for this model.
We use a refinement proof methodology to propagate the noninterference
property of the abstract machine down to the concrete machine level. We use an
intermediate layer in the refinement chain that factors out the details of the
information-flow control policy and devise a code generator for compiling such
information-flow policies into low-level monitor code. Finally, we verify the
correctness of this generator using a dedicated Hoare logic that abstracts from
low-level machine instructions into a reusable set of verified structured code
generators
Assumptions and guarantees for compositional noninterference
The idea of building secure systems by plugging together "secure" components is appealing, but this requires a definition of security which, in addition to taking care of top-level security goals, is strengthened appropriately in order to be compositional. This approach has been previously studied for information-flow security of shared-variable concurrent programs, but the price for compositionality is very high: a thread must be extremely pessimistic about what an environment might do with shared resources. This pessimism leads to many intuitively secure threads being labelled as insecure. Since in practice it is only meaningful to compose threads which follow an agreed protocol for data access, we take advantage of this to develop a more liberal compositional security condition. The idea is to give the security definition access to the intended pattern of data usage, as expressed by assumption-guarantee style conditions associated with each thread. We illustrate the improved precision by developing the first flow-sensitive security type system that provably enforces a noninterference-like property for concurrent programs. \ua9 2011 IEEE
Shining Light On Shadow Stacks
Control-Flow Hijacking attacks are the dominant attack vector against C/C++
programs. Control-Flow Integrity (CFI) solutions mitigate these attacks on the
forward edge,i.e., indirect calls through function pointers and virtual calls.
Protecting the backward edge is left to stack canaries, which are easily
bypassed through information leaks. Shadow Stacks are a fully precise mechanism
for protecting backwards edges, and should be deployed with CFI mitigations. We
present a comprehensive analysis of all possible shadow stack mechanisms along
three axes: performance, compatibility, and security. For performance
comparisons we use SPEC CPU2006, while security and compatibility are
qualitatively analyzed. Based on our study, we renew calls for a shadow stack
design that leverages a dedicated register, resulting in low performance
overhead, and minimal memory overhead, but sacrifices compatibility. We present
case studies of our implementation of such a design, Shadesmar, on Phoronix and
Apache to demonstrate the feasibility of dedicating a general purpose register
to a security monitor on modern architectures, and the deployability of
Shadesmar. Our comprehensive analysis, including detailed case studies for our
novel design, allows compiler designers and practitioners to select the correct
shadow stack design for different usage scenarios.Comment: To Appear in IEEE Security and Privacy 201
- …