Room 206 (2nd floor, badged access)
5 June 2025 - 14h00
Secure compilation—with the compiler, not against: first experiments on 'Tracing LLVM'
by Sébastien Michelland from Grenoble INP, LCIS
invited by Sylvain BOULME
5 June 2025 - 14h00
Secure compilation—with the compiler, not against: first experiments on 'Tracing LLVM'
by Sébastien Michelland from Grenoble INP, LCIS
invited by Sylvain BOULME
Abstract: Countermeasures against fault injection or side-channels attacks that have software components all face the same tension: on one hand, defeating accurate, micro-architectural attack models requires precise control of assembler code; on the other hand, security requirements are application-specific and originate in the source code (usually C).
Countermeasures found in literature almost never address this abstraction gap, usually finding ways to forsake either precise assembly output or control from source code, filling in the rest with compiler tricks that mostly work in practice but have no requirement to, and do fail whenever the compiler is too smart.
This talk will discuss the fundamental challenges in adding explicit compiler support for security (spoiler--not just optimizations!) and introduce Tracing LLVM, a prototype LLVM extension that helps build software countermeasures instead of hampering them. Tracing LLVM provides high-level tools for annotating some program properties relevant to security and guarantees control over their lowerings. This work was developed during my (now soon-ending) Ph.D. thesis.
