Fully Abstract Trace Semantics for Low-level Isolation Mechanisms – Extended Version

Many software systems adopt isolation mechanisms of modern processors as software security building blocks. Reasoning about these building blocks means reasoning about elaborate assembly code, which can be very complex due to the loose structure of the code. One way to overcome this complexity is providing the code with a more structured semantics. This paper presents one such semantics, namely a fully abstract trace semantics, for an assembly language enhanced with protection mechanisms of modern processors. The trace semantics represents the behaviour of protected assembly code with simple abstractions, unburdened by low-level details, at the maximum degree of precision. Furthermore, it captures the capabilities of attackers to protected software and simplifies providing a secure compiler targeting the assembly language. Fully Abstract Trace Semantics for Low-level Isolation Mechanisms – Extended version Marco Patrignani ∗ Dave Clarke iMinds-DistriNet, Dept. Computer Science, KU Leuven {first.last}@cs.kuleuven.be