System M: A Program Logic for Code Sandboxing and Identification
This work addresses security verification for applications handling untrusted code, but it is incremental as it builds on existing Hoare Type Theory.
The authors tackled the problem of verifying security-sensitive applications that execute untrusted code by developing System M, a new program logic that extends Hoare Type Theory to reason about code integrity and sandboxing, and they proved its soundness and applied it to verify a property in the Memoir trusted computing system.
Security-sensitive applications that execute untrusted code often check the code's integrity by comparing its syntax to a known good value or sandbox the code to contain its effects. System M is a new program logic for reasoning about such security-sensitive applications. System M extends Hoare Type Theory (HTT) to trace safety properties and, additionally, contains two new reasoning principles. First, its type system internalizes logical equality, facilitating reasoning about applications that check code integrity. Second, a confinement rule assigns an effect type to a computation based solely on knowledge of the computation's sandbox. We prove the soundness of system M relative to a step-indexed trace-based semantic model. We illustrate both new reasoning principles of system M by verifying the main integrity property of the design of Memoir, a previously proposed trusted computing system for ensuring state continuity of isolated security-sensitive applications.