Security Verification of Low-Trust Architectures

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2309.00181v1
• Date: Fri, 1 Sep 2023 00:22:24 GMT
• Title: Security Verification of Low-Trust Architectures
• Authors: Qinhan Tan, Yonathan Fisseha, Shibo Chen, Lauren Biernacki, Jean-Baptiste Jeannin, Sharad Malik, Todd Austin,
• Abstract summary: We perform a complete formal verification of a specific low-trust architecture, the Sequestered Encryption (SE) architecture. We first define the security requirements of the ISA of SE low-trust architecture. We show how these proof obligations can be successfully discharged using commercial formal verification tools.
• Score: 2.7080187684202968
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
• Abstract: Low-trust architectures work on, from the viewpoint of software, always-encrypted data, and significantly reduce the amount of hardware trust to a small software-free enclave component. In this paper, we perform a complete formal verification of a specific low-trust architecture, the Sequestered Encryption (SE) architecture, to show that the design is secure against direct data disclosures and digital side channels for all possible programs. We first define the security requirements of the ISA of SE low-trust architecture. Looking upwards, this ISA serves as an abstraction of the hardware for the software, and is used to show how any program comprising these instructions cannot leak information, including through digital side channels. Looking downwards this ISA is a specification for the hardware, and is used to define the proof obligations for any RTL implementation arising from the ISA-level security requirements. These cover both functional and digital side-channel leakage. Next, we show how these proof obligations can be successfully discharged using commercial formal verification tools. We demonstrate the efficacy of our RTL security verification technique for seven different correct and buggy implementations of the SE architecture.

Related papers

• Architecting Trust: A Framework for Secure IoT Systems Through Trusted Execution and Semantic Middleware [1.7277199466514768]
  The Internet of Things (IoT) security landscape requires the architectural solutions that can address the technical and operational challenges.<n>This paper presents the comprehensive security framework for IoT that should integrate the Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) with the semantic and blockchain technologies.<n>The architecture includes the hardware rooted trust at peripheral level, the zero trust principles at network level, and the semantic security mechanisms at application level.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-02-11T11:48:41Z)
• CaMeLs Can Use Computers Too: System-level Security for Computer Use Agents [60.98294016925157]
  AI agents are vulnerable to prompt injection attacks, where malicious content hijacks agent behavior to steal credentials or cause financial loss.<n>We introduce Single-Shot Planning for CUAs, where a trusted planner generates a complete execution graph with conditional branches before any observation of potentially malicious content.<n>Although this architectural isolation successfully prevents instruction injections, we show that additional measures are needed to prevent Branch Steering attacks.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-01-14T23:06:35Z)
• Towards Verifiably Safe Tool Use for LLM Agents [53.55621104327779]
  Large language model (LLM)-based AI agents extend capabilities by enabling access to tools such as data sources, APIs, search engines, code sandboxes, and even other agents.<n>LLMs may invoke unintended tool interactions and introduce risks, such as leaking sensitive data or overwriting critical records.<n>Current approaches to mitigate these risks, such as model-based safeguards, enhance agents' reliability but cannot guarantee system safety.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-01-12T21:31:38Z)
• Signing Right Away [0.0]
  Signing Right Away (SRA) is a comprehensive security architecture that guarantees the provenance of digital media.<n>SRA ensures that every captured image and video carries an immutable, verifiable proof of origin.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2025-10-07T11:56:56Z)
• Bridging the Mobile Trust Gap: A Zero Trust Framework for Consumer-Facing Applications [51.56484100374058]
  This paper proposes an extended Zero Trust model designed for mobile applications operating in untrusted, user-controlled environments.<n>Using a design science methodology, the study introduced a six-pillar framework that supports runtime enforcement of trust.<n>The proposed model offers a practical and standards-aligned approach to securing mobile applications beyond pre-deployment controls.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2025-08-20T18:42:36Z)
• Fortifying the Agentic Web: A Unified Zero-Trust Architecture Against Logic-layer Threats [1.3029461861316425]
  This paper presents a Unified Security Architecture that fortifies the Agentic Web through a Zero-Trust IAM framework.<n>This architecture is built on a foundation of rich, verifiable agent identities using Decentralized IDs (DIDs) and Verifiable Credentials (VCs)<n>Security is operationalized through a multi-layered Trust Fabric.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2025-08-17T06:52:39Z)
• Security Enclave Architecture for Heterogeneous Security Primitives for Supply-Chain Attacks [7.9837065464150685]
  This paper explores the range of obstacles encountered when building a unified security architecture capable of addressing multiple attack vectors.<n>We present a thorough evaluation of its impact on silicon area and power consumption across various ASIC technologies.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2025-07-15T04:28:02Z)
• Zero-Trust Foundation Models: A New Paradigm for Secure and Collaborative Artificial Intelligence for Internet of Things [61.43014629640404]
  Zero-Trust Foundation Models (ZTFMs) embed zero-trust security principles into the lifecycle of foundation models (FMs) for Internet of Things (IoT) systems.<n>ZTFMs can enable secure, privacy-preserving AI across distributed, heterogeneous, and potentially adversarial IoT environments.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2025-05-26T06:44:31Z)
• Securing Legacy Communication Networks via Authenticated Cyclic Redundancy Integrity Check [98.34702864029796]
  We propose Authenticated Cyclic Redundancy Integrity Check (ACRIC) ACRIC preserves backward compatibility without requiring additional hardware and is protocol agnostic. We show that ACRIC offers robust security with minimal transmission overhead ( 1 ms)
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-11-21T18:26:05Z)
• VeriCHERI: Exhaustive Formal Security Verification of CHERI at the RTL [4.652188875442064]
  CHERI provides and enforces fine-grained memory protection directly in the hardware. VeriCHERI is conceptionally different from previous works in that it does not require any ISA specification. We demonstrate the effectiveness and scalability of VeriCHERI on a RISC-V based processor implementing a CHERI variant.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-07-26T11:48:55Z)
• Stop Stealing My Data: Sanitizing Stego Channels in 3D Printing Design Files [56.96539046813698]
  steganographic channels can allow additional data to be embedded within the STL files without changing the printed model. This paper addresses this security threat by designing and evaluating a emphsanitizer that erases hidden content where steganographic channels might exist.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-04-07T23:28:35Z)
• SISSA: Real-time Monitoring of Hardware Functional Safety and Cybersecurity with In-vehicle SOME/IP Ethernet Traffic [49.549771439609046]
  We propose SISSA, a SOME/IP communication traffic-based approach for modeling and analyzing in-vehicle functional safety and cyber security. Specifically, SISSA models hardware failures with the Weibull distribution and addresses five potential attacks on SOME/IP communication. Extensive experimental results show the effectiveness and efficiency of SISSA.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-02-21T03:31:40Z)
• Synthesizing Hardware-Software Leakage Contracts for RISC-V Open-Source Processors [6.061386291375516]
  We propose a semi-automatic methodology for synthesizing hardware-software leakage contracts for open-source microarchitectures. We have instantiated this methodology for the RISC-V ISA and applied it to the Ibex and CVA6 open-source processors.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-01-17T17:54:53Z)
• HasTEE+ : Confidential Cloud Computing and Analytics with Haskell [50.994023665559496]
  Confidential computing enables the protection of confidential code and data in a co-tenanted cloud deployment using specialized hardware isolation units called Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) TEEs offer low-level C/C++-based toolchains that are susceptible to inherent memory safety vulnerabilities and lack language constructs to monitor explicit and implicit information-flow leaks. We address the above with HasTEE+, a domain-specific language (cla) embedded in Haskell that enables programming TEEs in a high-level language with strong type-safety.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-01-17T00:56:23Z)
• Towards Remotely Verifiable Software Integrity in Resource-Constrained IoT Devices [18.163077388258618]
  Low-cost security architectures have been proposed for remote verification of their software state via integrity proofs. This article provides a holistic and systematic treatment of this family of architectures. It also compares (qualitatively and quantitatively) the types of software integrity proofs, respective architectural support, and associated costs.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-01-09T01:50:21Z)
• Secure Instruction and Data-Level Information Flow Tracking Model for RISC-V [0.0]
  Unauthorized access, fault injection, and privacy invasion are potential threats from untrusted actors. We propose an integrated Information Flow Tracking (IFT) technique to enable runtime security to protect system integrity. This study proposes a multi-level IFT model that integrates a hardware-based IFT technique with a gate-level-based IFT (GLIFT) technique.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-11-17T02:04:07Z)
• A Novel Approach to Identify Security Controls in Source Code [4.598579706242066]
  This paper enumerates a comprehensive list of commonly used security controls and creates a dataset for each one of them. It uses the state-of-the-art NLP technique Bidirectional Representations from Transformers (BERT) and the Tactic Detector from our prior work to show that security controls could be identified with high confidence.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-07-10T21:14:39Z)
• Safe RAN control: A Symbolic Reinforcement Learning Approach [62.997667081978825]
  We present a Symbolic Reinforcement Learning (SRL) based architecture for safety control of Radio Access Network (RAN) applications. We provide a purely automated procedure in which a user can specify high-level logical safety specifications for a given cellular network topology. We introduce a user interface (UI) developed to help a user set intent specifications to the system, and inspect the difference in agent proposed actions.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2021-06-03T16:45:40Z)
• Symbolic Reinforcement Learning for Safe RAN Control [62.997667081978825]
  We show a Symbolic Reinforcement Learning (SRL) architecture for safe control in Radio Access Network (RAN) applications. In our tool, a user can select a high-level safety specifications expressed in Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) to shield an RL agent running in a given cellular network. We demonstrate the user interface (UI) helping the user set intent specifications to the architecture and inspect the difference in allowed and blocked actions.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2021-03-11T10:56:49Z)

This list is automatically generated from the titles and abstracts of the papers in this site.

This site does not guarantee the quality of this site (including all information) and is not responsible for any consequences.