Blame-aware Recomposition for Secure Compilation Proofs of Low-Level Compartment Isolation

Abstract

The security guarantees of existing formally verified compilers for compartmentalized programs in unsafe languages like C stop at a rather high level, assuming a built-in protection mechanism and a block-based memory model. Verifying a concrete, low-level enforcement mechanism for compartment isolation is still a major challenge for current proof techniques. In particular, Abate et al.'s proof technique fails because one of their proof steps, recomposition, essentially requires hiding all information about the code of each compartment, which is not practically achievable at a low level. We propose an extension of their proof technique to a low-level setting where compartments can fully observe each other's code. To do so, we introduce an overlay semantics that allows us to characterize these observations as a form of undefined behaviour, and we use a novel variant of recomposition that we call blame-aware recomposition, which essentially allows recomposing executions as needed in the original high-level proof technique, even if the low-level context observes the code, because this context is ultimately going to be discarded. We apply this new proof to a compartment isolation mechanism that uses a programmable tag-based reference monitor.