Execution Platform Contracts
Résumé
Confidentiality is a crucial security property for many critical applications. As a response to the discovery of numerous micro-architectural side channel attacks such as Spectre, allowing an attacker to extract secret information in pernicious ways, the notion of hardware/software contracts was proposed to formalise the guarantees provided by the hardware to the software. In this paper, we propose to extend this notion to include the guarantees provided by the operating system (OS), so far unspecified in such contracts. We formalize an attacker model adapted to a typical execution model on a shared platform. More precisely, we formalize common thread and memory management policies provided by the OS on top of a hardware model and explore the consequences of potential leaks emerging on such a platform. Our investigation shows that the OS policies play a crucial role in providing security guarantees to code processing sensitive data and thus have to be taken into consideration when writing such code through platform contracts.
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