[Pl-seminar] 9/19 Seminar: Mathias Pedersen: From trash to treasure: Timing-sensitive garbage collection

[Daniel Patterson]

NOTE: New weekly time for this semester is WEDNESDAY at 10:00AM!

NUPRL Seminar Presents

Mathias Pedersen
Aarhus University

10:00AM
Wednesday, September 19th, 2018
Room 366 WVH (http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/wand/directions.html)

>From trash to treasure: Timing-sensitive garbage collection

Abstract:

We study information flows arising from timing channels in the presence of automatic memory management. We construct a series of example attacks that illustrate how garbage collectors form a shared resource that can be used to reliably leak sensitive information at a rate of up to 1 byte/sec on a contemporary general-purpose computer. The created channel is also observable across a network connection in a datacenter-like setting. We subsequently present a design of an automatic memory management system and prove that the presented attacks are impossible on garbage collectors satisfying this design. The guarantees provided by the language has been mechanized in the Coq proof
assistant.

Bio:

Mathias is a third year PhD student in the Logic and Semantics group at Aarhus University in Denmark, advised by Aslan Askarov. His work is in the area of language-based security, with a focus on provable mitigation of side channels. In general, anything related to compilers and the semantics of programming languages will be on his list of interests.