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Flexible Runtime Security Enforcement with Tagged C

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Runtime Verification (RV 2023)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 14245))

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Abstract

We introduce Tagged C, a novel C variant with built-in tag-based reference monitoring that can be enforced by hardware mechanisms such as the PIPE (Processor Interlocks for Policy Enforcement) processor extension. Tagged C expresses security policies at the level of C source code. It is designed to express a variety of dynamic security policies, individually or in combination, and enforce them with compiler and hardware support. Tagged C supports multiple approaches to security and varying levels of strictness. We demonstrate this range by providing examples of memory safety, compartmentalization, and secure information flow policies. We also give a full formalized semantics and a reference interpreter for Tagged C.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Variants of PIPE have been called PUMP [15] or SDMP [27] and marketed commercially under the names Dover CoreGuard and Draper Inherently Secure Processor.

  2. 2.

    Available at https://github.com/SNoAnd/Tagged-C.

  3. 3.

    For simplicity, we omit showing tag rules that play no interesting role in this example: and , which are triggered each time a variable is read and assigned, respectively, and , which is triggered by the call itself.

  4. 4.

    It inherits the limitations of CompCert C, primarily that setjump and longjump may not work, and variable-length arrays are not supported.

  5. 5.

    Not to be confused with the control-flow graph join points discussed in Sect. 4.3.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the reviewers for their valuable feedback, and Roberto Blanco for his advice during the writing process. This work was supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 2048499, Specifying and Verifying Secure Compilation of C Code to Tagged Hardware.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Portland State University, Portland, OR, USA

    Sean Anderson, Allison Naaktgeboren & Andrew Tolmach

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  1. Sean Anderson
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Correspondence to Sean Anderson .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Dept. of Informatics, Aristotle Univ. of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, Greece

    Panagiotis Katsaros

  2. University of Trieste, Trieste, Italy

    Laura Nenzi

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Anderson, S., Naaktgeboren, A., Tolmach, A. (2023). Flexible Runtime Security Enforcement with Tagged C. In: Katsaros, P., Nenzi, L. (eds) Runtime Verification. RV 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14245. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44267-4_12

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