Sockeye: a language for analyzing hardware documentation

TL;DR

Sockeye introduces a domain-specific language for formal hardware documentation analysis, enabling security proofs, error detection, and vulnerability discovery across multiple hardware platforms.

Contribution

It provides a novel language and tooling for formal security analysis of hardware documentation, with proofs and real-world vulnerability findings.

Findings

Formal security proofs for memory confidentiality and integrity.

Discovered documentation errors in hardware references.

Identified a vulnerability on a real-world server chip.

Abstract

The ever increasing complexity of hardware platforms poses a challenge to systems programmers. Correctly programming a multitude of components, providing functionality and security, is difficult: semantics of individual units are described in prose, underspecified, and prone to inaccuracies. Rigorous statements about platform security are often impossible. We introduce a domain-specific language to describe hardware semantics, assumptions about software behavior, and desired security properties. We then create machine-readable specifications for a diverse set of eight platforms from their reference manuals, and formally prove their (in-)security. In addition to security proofs about memory confidentiality and integrity, we discover a handful of documentation errors. Finally, our analysis also revealed a vulnerability on a real-world server chip, which was confirmed by the vendor to apply to a wide family of deployed network appliances. Our tooling offers system integrators a way of formally describing security properties for whole platforms, and the means to find counterexamples, or proving them correct.