PhD position - Speculating About Low-level Security

OPPORTUNITY DETAILS

Total reward

0 $

State University

CEA Tech

Area

Western Europe

Host Country

France

Deadline

31 Oct 2021

Study level

Doctoral Degree

Opportunity type

PhD

Specialities

Information technology and computer science

Opportunity funding

Not funding

Eligible Countries

This opportunity is destined for all countries

Eligible Region

All Regions

SL-DRT-21-0559

RESEARCH FIELD

Cyber security : hardware and sofware

ABSTRACT

We consider the general context of automated code-level security analysis. While standard attacks such as control-flow hijacking take advantage of programming flaws (typically, missing bound checks), recent micro-architectural attacks take advantage of subtle behaviours at the micro-architectural levels, typically speculative behaviours introduced in modern architectures for efficiency, in order to bypass protections and leak sensitive data. These vulnerabilities are extremely hard to find by a human expert, as they require to reason at a very low-level, on an exponential number of otherwise-hidden speculative behaviours, and on complex security properties (leaks and data interference, rather than standard memory corruptions). The goal of this doctoral work is to understand how automated symbolic verification and bug finding methods (especially but not limited to, symbolic execution) can be efficiently lifted to the case of speculative micro-architectural attacks, with the ultimate goal of securing essential security primitives in cryptographic libraries and OS kernels. This general objective raises challenges in terms of semantics of speculative behaviours, semantics of security properties and scalability of verification techniques. These techniques will be implemented in the binary-level code analysis framework BINSEC and their benefits assessed through rigorous experimental evaluation.