Related papers: Contract-Aware Secure Compilation
AI agents are vulnerable to prompt injection attacks, where malicious content hijacks agent behavior to steal credentials or cause financial loss. The only known robust defense is architectural isolation that strictly separates trusted task…
Whenever a bug occurs in a program, software developers assume that the code is flawed, not the compiler. In fact, if compilers should be correct, they are just normal software with their own bugs. Hard to find, errors in them have…
This paper discusses the relationship between two frameworks: universal composability (UC) and robust compilation (RC). In cryptography, UC is a framework for the specification and analysis of cryptographic protocols with a strong…
Verification of software systems is a very hard problem due to the large size of program state-space. The traditional techniques (like model checking) do not scale; since they include the whole state-space by inlining the library function…
We introduce the Context Compliance Attack (CCA), a novel, optimization-free method for bypassing AI safety mechanisms. Unlike current approaches -- which rely on complex prompt engineering and computationally intensive optimization -- CCA…
Compiler correctness is an old problem, but with the emergence of smart contracts on blockchains that problem presents itself in a new light. Smart contracts are self-contained pieces of software that control assets, which are often of high…
Rigorous quantitative evaluation of microarchitectural side channels is challenging for two reasons. First, the processors, attacks, and defenses often exhibit probabilistic behaviors. These probabilistic behaviors arise due to natural…
The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is a recently proposed interoperability standard that unifies how AI agents connect with external tools and data sources. By defining a set of common client-server message exchange clauses, MCP replaces…
The disastrous vulnerabilities in smart contracts sharply remind us of our ignorance: we do not know how to write code that is secure in composition with malicious code. Information flow control has long been proposed as a way to achieve…
Memory corruption vulnerabilities are still a severe threat for software systems. To thwart the exploitation of such vulnerabilities, many different kinds of defenses have been proposed in the past. Most prominently, Control-Flow Integrity…
Biometric systems, while offering convenient authentication, often fall short in providing rigorous security assurances. A primary reason is the ad-hoc design of protocols and components, which hinders the establishment of comprehensive…
This paper describes an `obfuscating' C compiler for encrypted computing. The context consists of (i) a processor that `works encrypted', taking in encrypted inputs and producing encrypted outputs while the data remains in encrypted form…
How will future microarchitectures impact the security of existing cryptographic implementations? As we cannot keep reducing the size of transistors, chip vendors have started developing new microarchitectural optimizations to speed up…
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…
On the way to Exascale, programmers face the increasing challenge of having to support multiple hardware architectures from the same code base. At the same time, portability of code and performance are increasingly difficult to achieve as…
We present a quantum CISC compiler and show how to assemble complex instruction sets in a scalable way. Enlarging the toolbox of universal gates by optimised complex multi-qubit instruction sets thus paves the way to fight decoherence for…
Microarchitectural timing channels enable unwanted information flow across security boundaries, violating fundamental security assumptions. They leverage timing variations of several state-holding microarchitectural components and have been…
Smart contracts form the core of Web3 applications. Contracts mediate the transfer of cryptocurrency, making them irresistible targets for hackers. We introduce ASP, a system aimed at easing the construction of provably secure contracts.…
We introduce a novel approach to secure compilation based on maps of distributive laws. We demonstrate through four examples that the coherence criterion for maps of distributive laws can potentially be a viable alternative for compiler…
Recent work has shown that out-of-order and speculative execution mechanisms used to increase performance in the majority of processors expose the processors to critical attacks. These attacks, called Meltdown and Spectre, exploit the side…