Principles of Secure Compilation (PriSC) 2023

Today’s computer systems are insecure. The semantics of mainstream low-level languages like C provide no security against devastating vulnerabilities like buffer overflows and control-flow hijacking. Even for safer languages, establishing security with respect to the language’s semantics does not prevent low-level attacks. All the abstraction and security guarantees of the source language may be lost when interacting with low-level code, e.g., when using libraries.

Secure compilation is an emerging field that puts together advances in programming languages, security, verification, systems, compilers, and hardware architectures in order to devise secure compiler chains that eliminate many of today’s low-level vulnerabilities. Secure compilation aims to protect high-level language abstractions in compiled code, even against low-level adversaries, and to allow sound reasoning about security in the source language. The emerging secure compilation community aims to achieve this by:

identifying and formalizing properties that secure compilers must possess;

devising efficient enforcement mechanisms; and

developing effective formal verification techniques.

The goal of this workshop is to identify interesting research directions and open challenges and to bring together researchers interested in working on building secure compilation chains, on developing proof techniques and verification tools, and on designing software or hardware enforcement mechanisms for secure compilation.

Format
This will be an informal workshop without any proceedings. Anyone interested in presenting at the workshop will submit an extended abstract (up to 2 pages), and the PC will decide which talks to accept based on a lightweight review process. We expect the acceptance rate to be high in the initial editions, so another important role of the PC is to spur interesting submissions. We will also run a short talks session, where participants get 5 minutes to present intriguing ideas and advertise ongoing work.