Title
Reconciling optimization with secure compilation
Abstract
AbstractSoftware protections against side-channel and physical attacks are essential to the development of secure applications. Such protections are meaningful at machine code or micro-architectural level, but they typically do not carry observable semantics at source level. This renders them susceptible to miscompilation, and security engineers embed input/output side-effects to prevent optimizing compilers from altering them. Yet these side-effects are error-prone and compiler-dependent. The current practice involves analyzing the generated machine code to make sure security or privacy properties are still enforced. These side-effects may also be too expensive in fine-grained protections such as control-flow integrity. We introduce observations of the program state that are intrinsic to the correct execution of security protections, along with means to specify and preserve observations across the compilation flow. Such observations complement the input/output semantics-preservation contract of compilers. We introduce an opacification mechanism to preserve and enforce a partial ordering of observations. This approach is compatible with a production compiler and does not incur any modification to its optimization passes. We validate the effectiveness and performance of our approach on a range of benchmarks, expressing the secure compilation of these applications in terms of observations to be made at specific program points.
Year
DOI
Venue
2021
10.1145/3485519
Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages
Keywords
DocType
Volume
compilation, security, optimization, debugging, LLVM
Journal
5
Issue
Citations 
PageRank 
OOPSLA
0
0.34
References 
Authors
0
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Son Tuan Vu100.68
Albert Cohen2100272.30
Arnaud de Grandmaison300.68
Christophe Guillon4846.07
Karine Heydemann511613.65