Secure Compilation (Dagstuhl Seminar 18201)

Abstract

Secure compilation is an emerging field that puts together advances in
security, programming languages, verification, systems, and hardware
architectures in order to devise secure compilation chains that
eliminate many of today's vulnerabilities.
Secure compilation aims to protect a source language's abstractions in
compiled code, even against low-level attacks.
For a concrete example, all modern languages provide a notion of
structured control flow and an invoked procedure is expected to return
to the right place.
However, today's compilation chains (compilers, linkers, loaders,
runtime systems, hardware) cannot efficiently enforce this
abstraction: linked low-level code can call and return to arbitrary
instructions or smash the stack, blatantly violating the high-level
abstraction.
The emerging secure compilation community aims to address such
problems by devising formal security criteria, efficient enforcement
mechanisms, and effective proof techniques.

This seminar strived to take a broad and inclusive view of secure
compilation and to provide a forum for discussion on the topic. The
goal was to identify interesting research directions and open
challenges by bringing together people working on building secure
compilation chains, on developing proof techniques and verification
tools, and on designing security mechanisms.