Title
Position paper: Sapper -- a language for provable hardware policy enforcement
Abstract
We describe Sapper, a language for creating critical hardware components that have provably secure information flow. Most systems that enforce information flow policies place the hardware microarchitecture within the trusted computing base, and also assume that the observable behavior of that microarchitecture is fully and correctly documented. However, the reality is that this behavior is incompletely (and sometimes incorrectly) specified, and that the microarchitecture itself often contains implementation bugs. This fact means that all such systems are vulnerable to attack by exploiting undocumented or buggy hardware features. Sapper addresses this problem by enabling flexible and efficient hardware design that is provably secure with respect to a given information flow policy. Sapper uses a hybrid approach that leverages unique language features and static analysis to determine a set of dynamic checks that are automatically inserted into the hardware design. These checks are provably sufficient to guarantee that the resulting hardware prevents all explicit, implicit, and timing channels even if the hardware is otherwise buggy or poorly documented.
Year
DOI
Venue
2013
10.1145/2465106.2465214
PLAS
Keywords
Field
DocType
efficient hardware design,critical hardware component,resulting hardware,provable hardware policy enforcement,position paper,hardware design,observable behavior,hardware microarchitecture,buggy hardware feature,unique language feature,provably secure information flow,information flow policy,information flow,hardware description language
Information flow (information theory),Programming language,Hardware compatibility list,Computer science,Position paper,Static analysis,Communication channel,Computer hardware,Trusted computing base,Hardware description language,Microarchitecture
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
1
0.36
24
Authors
9
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Xun Li11275.94
Vineeth Kashyap21818.73
Jason K. Oberg31786.45
Mohit Tiwari444523.94
Vasanth Ram Rajarathinam5773.30
Ryan Kastner61779147.73
Timothy Sherwood71921123.28
Ben Hardekopf844422.12
Frederic T. Chong91428130.07