Related papers: Fully Countering Trusting Trust through Diverse Do…

An Air Force evaluation of Multics, and Ken Thompson's famous Turing award lecture "Reflections on Trusting Trust," showed that compilers can be subverted to insert malicious Trojan horses into critical software, including themselves. If…

In his 1984 Turing Award lecture, Ken Thompson showed that a compiler could be maliciously altered to insert backdoors into programs it compiles and perpetuate this behavior by modifying any compiler it subsequently builds. Thompson's hack…

Proving secure compilation of partial programs typically requires back-translating an attack against the compiled program to an attack against the source program. To prove back-translation, one can syntactically translate the target…

We present a new type of attack in which source code is maliciously encoded so that it appears different to a compiler and to the human eye. This attack exploits subtleties in text-encoding standards such as Unicode to produce source code…

Deep learning (DL) compilers are core infrastructure in modern DL systems, offering flexibility and scalability beyond vendor-specific libraries. This work uncovers a fundamental vulnerability in their design: can an official, unmodified…

Fault attacks against embedded circuits enabled to define many new attack paths against secure circuits. Every attack path relies on a specific fault model which defines the type of faults that the attacker can perform. On embedded…

This paper explores the parallels between Thompson's "Reflections on Trusting Trust" and modern challenges in LLM-based code generation. We examine how Thompson's insights about compiler backdoors take on new relevance in the era of large…

Environmental noise (e.g.heat, ionized particles, etc.) causes transient faults in hardware, which lead to corruption of stored values. Mission-critical devices require such faults to be mitigated by fault-tolerance --- a combination of…

Secure compilers generate compiled code that withstands many target-level attacks such as alteration of control flow, data leaks or memory corruption. Many existing secure compilers are proven to be fully abstract, meaning that they reflect…

Secure compilation prevents all low-level attacks on compiled code and allows for sound reasoning about security in the source language. In this work we propose a new attacker model for secure compilation that extends the well-known notion…

Too many defective compute chips are escaping existing manufacturing tests -- at least an order of magnitude more than industrial targets across all compute chip types in data centers. Silent data corruptions (SDCs) caused by test escapes,…

Secure multi-party computation (MPC) is a fundamental problem in secure distributed computing. An MPC protocol allows a set of $n$ mutually distrusting parties to carry out any joint computation of their private inputs, without disclosing…

We propose a new formal criterion for evaluating secure compilation schemes for unsafe languages, expressing end-to-end security guarantees for software components that may become compromised after encountering undefined behavior---for…

Encrypted computing is an emerging technology based on a processor that `works encrypted', taking encrypted inputs to encrypted outputs while data remains in encrypted form throughout. It aims to secure user data against possible insider…

The implementations of most hardened cryptographic libraries use defensive programming techniques for side-channel resistance. These techniques are usually specified as guidelines to developers on specific code patterns to use or avoid.…

A verification method for distributed systems based on decoupling forward and backward behaviour is proposed. This method uses an event structure based algorithm that, given a CCS process, constructs its causal compression relative to a…

Third-party intellectual property cores are essential building blocks of modern system-on-chip and integrated circuit designs. However, these design components usually come from vendors of different trust levels and may contain undocumented…

Attackers can access sensitive information of programs by exploiting the side-effects of speculatively-executed instructions using Spectre attacks. To mitigate theses attacks, popular compilers deployed a wide range of countermeasures. The…

Classical computability theory tells us that self-modifying code (SMC) on a deterministic universal Turing machine can be simulated by non-SMC code on the same model. That abstraction, however, omits the external timing inputs, concurrency,…

Computer programs may go wrong due to exceptional behaviors, out-of-bound array accesses, or simply coding errors. Thus, they cannot be blindly trusted. Scientific computing programs make no exception in that respect, and even bring…