Hardware-software contracts for secure speculation, Best Paper Award at the 42nd IEEE Symposium

IMDEA Software Institute researchers Marco Guarnieri and Pepe Vila together with Boris Köpf (Microsoft Research) and Jan Reineke (Saarland University) won a best paper award at the 42nd IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P) for their paper “Hardware-Software Contracts for Secure Speculation”.

Since the discovery of Spectre, a large number of hardware mechanisms for secure speculation has been proposed. Intuitively, more defensive mechanisms are less efficient but can securely execute a larger class of programs, while more permissive mechanisms may offer more performance but require more defensive programming. Unfortunately, there are no hardware-software contracts that would turn this intuition into a basis for principled co-design.

The paper develops a framework for defining hardware-software contracts that capture hardware side-channel security guarantees in a simple, mechanism-independent manner. The framework provides foundations for principled co-design of hardware and software for side-channel resistant systems. Using this framework, the authors characterize the security guarantees provided by recent hardware mechanisms for secure speculation; mapping each mechanism to a set of hardware-software contracts. Contracts are also the basis for secure programming, where different contracts impose distinct software-level requirements for end-to-end security.

The work was supported by a grant from Intel Corporation, Atracción de Talento Investigador grant 2018- T2/TIC-11732A, Juan de la Cierva-Formación grant FJC2018- 036513-I, Spanish project RTI2018-102043-B-I00 SCUM, and Madrid regional project S2018/TCS-4339 BLOQUES.

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