English

Triosecuris: Formally Verified Protection Against Speculative Control-Flow Hijacking

Cryptography and Security 2026-04-03 v2 Programming Languages

Abstract

This paper introduces Triosecuris, a formally verified defense against Spectre BTB, RSB, and PHT that combines CET-style hardware-assisted control-flow integrity with compiler-inserted speculative load hardening (SLH). Triosecuris is based on the novel observation that in the presence of CET-style protection, we can precisely detect BTB misspeculation for indirect calls and RSB misspeculation for returns and set the SLH misspeculation flag. We formalize Triosecuris as a transformation in Rocq and provide a machine-checked proof that it achieves relative security: any transformed program running with speculation leaks no more than what the source program leaks without speculation. This strong security guarantee applies to arbitrary programs, even those not following the cryptographic constant-time programming discipline.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2601.22978,
  title  = {Triosecuris: Formally Verified Protection Against Speculative Control-Flow Hijacking},
  author = {Jonathan Baumann and Yonghyun Kim and Yan Farba and Catalin Hritcu and Julay Leatherman-Brooks},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.22978},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

Conditionally accepted at CSF'26; extended with concrete protection against Spectre RSB and renamed to Triosecuris

R2 v1 2026-07-01T09:27:47.497Z