RockSalt: better, faster, stronger SFI for the x86

  • Authors:

  • Greg Morrisett;Gang Tan;Joseph Tassarotti;Jean-Baptiste Tristan;Edward Gan

  • Affiliations:

  • Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA;Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA, USA;Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA;Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA;Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 33rd ACM SIGPLAN conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

Software-based fault isolation (SFI), as used in Google's Native Client (NaCl), relies upon a conceptually simple machine-code analysis to enforce a security policy. But for complicated architectures such as the x86, it is all too easy to get the details of the analysis wrong. We have built a new checker that is smaller, faster, and has a much reduced trusted computing base when compared to Google's original analysis. The key to our approach is automatically generating the bulk of the analysis from a declarative description which we relate to a formal model of a subset of the x86 instruction set architecture. The x86 model, developed in Coq, is of independent interest and should be usable for a wide range of machine-level verification tasks.