Towards End-to-End Verified TEEs via Verified Interface Conformance and Certified Compilers

• Published in: 2023 IEEE 36th Computer Security Foundations Symposium (CSF) pp. 324 - 339
• Main Authors: Derakhshan, Farzaneh, Zhang, Zichao, Vasudevan, Amit, Jia, Limin
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01-07-2023
• Subjects: Codes; Cognition; Computational modeling; Costs; Privacy; Program processors; Security and Privacy Protection; Software systems; Software/Program Verification; Specifying and Verifying and Reasoning about Programs
• ISSN: 2374-8303
• DOI: 10.1109/CSF57540.2023.00021

Trusted Execution Environments (TEE) are ubiq-uitous. They form the highest privileged software component of the platform with full access to the system and associated devices. However, vulnerabilities have been found in deployed TEEs allowing an attacker to gain complete control. Despite the progress made in fully-verified software systems, few deployed TEEs are fully-verified, due to the high cost of verification. Instead of aiming for full-functional correctness, this paper proposes a formal framework and approach that leverages com-partmentalization at the source level to bring security-relevant properties verified at the source level down to the binary via existing certified compilers. The benefit of our approach is the relative low cost of verification: developers can use existing automated program verification tools and certified compilers. Our case studies demonstrate how security properties verified on two open-source TEEs at the source level can be pushed down to the compiled code by using an off-the-shelf certified compiler.