Abstract
Over time, hardware designs have constantly grown in complexity and modern platforms involve multiple interconnected hardware components. During the last decade, several vulnerability disclosures have proven that trust in hardware can be misplaced. In this article, we give a formal definition of Hardware-based Security Enforcement (HSE) mechanisms, a class of security enforcement mechanisms such that a software component relies on the underlying hardware platform to enforce a security policy. We then model a subset of a x86-based hardware platform specifications and we prove the soundness of a realistic HSE mechanism within this model using Coq, a proof assistant system.
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Notes
- 1.
Which can be found at: https://github.com/lethom/speccert.
- 2.
Written in AT&T syntax here.
- 3.
A VGA controller is a hardware device which on we can connect a screen. It exposes some memory to the CPU for communication purposes.
- 4.
These cache strategies are explained in [12], Volume 3A, Chap. 11, Sect. 11.3 (page 2316–2317).
- 5.
If we had to actually implement the HSE mechanism, we would have to assume the first was the correct one.
- 6.
Our implementation is available here: https://github.com/lethom/speccert.
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Letan, T., Chifflier, P., Hiet, G., Néron, P., Morin, B. (2016). SpecCert: Specifying and Verifying Hardware-Based Security Enforcement. In: Fitzgerald, J., Heitmeyer, C., Gnesi, S., Philippou, A. (eds) FM 2016: Formal Methods. FM 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9995. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48989-6_30
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