The process isolation enforceable by commodity hardware and operating systems is too weak to protect secrets from malicious code running on the same machine: attacks exploit timing side channels derived from contention on shared microarchitectural resources to extract secrets. With appropriate hardware support, however, we can construct isolated enclaves and safeguard independent processes from interference through timing side channels, a step towards confidentiality and integrity guarantees.

Traditional modeling approaches in computer architecture aim to obtain an accurate estimation of performance, area, and energy of a processor design. With the advent of speculative execution attacks and their security concerns, these traditional modeling techniques fall short when used for security evaluation of defenses against these attacks.

Rule-based hardware-design languages (RHDLs) promise to enhance developer productivity by offering convenient abstractions. Advanced compiler technology keeps the cost of these abstractions low, generating circuits with excellent area and timing properties.

C remains central to our infrastructure, making verification of C code an essential and much-researched topic, but the semantics of C is remarkably complex, and important aspects of it are still unsettled, leaving programmers and verification tool builders on shaky ground. This paper describes a tool, Cerberus-BMC, that for the first time provides a principled reference semantics that simultaneously supports (1) a choice of concurrency memory model (including substantial fragments of the C11, RC11, and Linux kernel memory models), (2) a modern memory object model, and (3) a well-validated thread-local semantics for a large fragment of the language. The tool should be useful for C programmers, compiler writers, verification tool builders, and members of the C/C++ standards committees.