Paper 2019/310
A Formal Approach to Secure Speculation
Kevin Cheang, Cameron Rasmussen, Sanjit Seshia, and Pramod Subramanyan
Abstract
Transient execution attacks like Spectre, Meltdown and Foreshadow have shown that combinations of microarchitectural side-channels can be synergistically 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 of information flow security properties called trace property-dependent observational determinism (TPOD). We use this class to formulate a secure speculation property. Our formulation precisely characterises all transient execution vulnerabilities. We demonstrate its applicability by verifying secure speculation for several illustrative programs.
Note: Minor typos fixed + additional discussion of Spectector in the related work.
Metadata
- Available format(s)
-
PDF
- Category
- Implementation
- Publication info
- Published elsewhere. Minor revision. 32nd IEEE Computer Security Foundations Symposium
- DOI
- 10.1109/CSF.2019.00027
- Keywords
- speculationtransient executionformal methodsformal verificationmodel checkingobservational determinism
- Contact author(s)
- spramod @ cse iitk ac in
- History
- 2019-10-26: last of 2 revisions
- 2019-03-20: received
- See all versions
- Short URL
- https://ia.cr/2019/310
- License
-
CC BY
BibTeX
@misc{cryptoeprint:2019/310,
author = {Kevin Cheang and Cameron Rasmussen and Sanjit Seshia and Pramod Subramanyan},
title = {A Formal Approach to Secure Speculation},
howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2019/310},
year = {2019},
doi = {10.1109/CSF.2019.00027},
url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/310}
}