Automatic ISA analysis for Secure Context Switching
Neelu S. Kalani (1, 2), Thomas Bourgeat (1), Guerney D. H. Hunt, (3), Wojciech Ozga (2) ((1) EPFL Switzerland, (2) IBM Research Zurich, (3), IBM T. J. Watson Research Center)

TL;DR
This paper introduces Sailor, a tool that automates ISA analysis for secure context switching by leveraging machine-readable specifications, revealing security vulnerabilities caused by mishandled ISA-state in confidential systems.
Contribution
We present Sailor, a novel tool that automates ISA-state analysis for secure context switching, identifying security-sensitive states and vulnerabilities in open-source confidential computing systems.
Findings
Identified three classes of mishandled ISA-state
Discovered five security vulnerabilities exploitable via ISA-state mishandling
Automated analysis reduces manual effort and errors in ISA security assessment
Abstract
Instruction set architectures are complex, with hundreds of registers and instructions that can modify dozens of them during execution, variably on each instance. Prose-style ISA specifications struggle to capture these intricacies of the ISAs, where often the important details about a single register are spread out across hundreds of pages of documentation. Ensuring that all ISA-state is swapped in context switch implementations of privileged software requires meticulous examination of these pages. This manual process is tedious and error-prone. We propose a tool called Sailor that leverages machine-readable ISA specifications written in Sail to automate this task. Sailor determines the ISA-state necessary to swap during the context switch using the data collected from Sail and a novel algorithm to classify ISA-state as security-sensitive. Using Sailor's output, we identify three…
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Taxonomy
TopicsNetwork Security and Intrusion Detection · IPv6, Mobility, Handover, Networks, Security
