The current gold standard of cryptographic software is to write efficient libraries with systematic protections against timing attacks. In order to meet this goal, cryptographic engineers increasingly use high-assurance cryptography tools. These tools guide programmers and provide rigorous guarantees that can be verified independently by library users. However, high-assurance tools reason about overly simple execution models that elide transient execution leakage. Thus, implementations validated by high-assurance cryptography tools remain potentially vulnerable to transient execution attacks such as Spectre or Meltdown. Moreover, proposed countermeasures are not used in practice due to performance overhead.We propose, analyze, implement and evaluate an approach for writing efficient cryptographic implementations that are protected against Spectre v1 attacks. Our approach ensures speculative constant-time, an information flow property which guarantees that programs are protected against Spectre v1. Speculative constant-time is enforced by means of a (value-dependent) information flow type system. The type system tracks security levels depending on whether execution is misspeculating. We implement our approach in the Jasmin framework for high-assurance cryptography, and use it for protecting all implementations of an experimental cryptographic library that includes highly optimized implementations of symmetric primitives, of elliptic-curve cryptography, and of Kyber, a lattice-based KEM recently selected by NIST for standardization. The performance impact of our protections is very low; for example, less than 1% for Kyber and essentially zero for X25519.

Cryptographic constant-time (CT) is a popular programming discipline used by cryptographic libraries to protect themselves against timing attacks. The CT discipline aims to enforce that program execution does not leak secrets, where leakage is defined by a formal leakage model. In practice, different leakage models coexist, sometimes even within a single library, both to reflect different architectures and to accommodate different security-efficiency trade-offs.

Many security properties of interest are captured by instrumented semantics that model the functional behavior and the leakage of programs. For several important properties, including cryptographic constant-time (CCT), leakage models are sufficiently abstract that one can define instrumented semantics for high-level and low-level programs. One important goal is then to relate leakage of source programs and leakage of their compilation---this can be used, e.g., to prove preservation of CCT. To simplify this task, we put forward the idea of structured leakage. In contrast to the usual modeling of leakage as a sequence of observations, structured leakage is tightly coupled with the operational semantics of programs. This coupling greatly simplifies the definition of leakage transformers that map the leakage of source programs to leakage of their compilation and yields more precise statements about the preservation of security properties. We illustrate our methods on the Jasmin compiler and prove preservation results for two policies of interest: CCT and cost.

High-assurance cryptography leverages methods from program verification and cryptography engineering to deliver efficient cryptographic software with machine-checked proofs of memory safety, functional correctness, provable security, and absence of timing leaks. Traditionally, these guarantees are established under a sequential execution semantics. However, this semantics is not aligned with the behavior of modern processors that make use of speculative execution to improve performance. This mismatch, combined with the high-profile Spectre-style attacks that exploit speculative execution, naturally casts doubts on the robustness of high-assurance cryptography guarantees. In this paper, we dispel these doubts by showing that the benefits of high-assurance cryptography extend to speculative execution, costing only a modest performance overhead. We build atop the Jasmin verification framework an end-to-end approach for proving properties of cryptographic software under speculative execution, and validate our approach experimentally with efficient, functionally correct assembly implementations of ChaCha20 and Poly1305, which are secure against both traditional timing and speculative execution attacks.

Programming geo-replicated distributed systems is challenging given the complexity of reasoning about different evolving states on different replicas. Existing approaches to this problem impose significant burden on application developers to consider the effect of how operations performed on one replica are witnessed and applied on others. To alleviate these challenges, we present a fundamentally different approach to programming in the presence of replicated state. Our insight is based on the use of invertible relational specifications of an inductively-defined data type as a mechanism to capture salient aspects of the data type relevant to how its different instances can be safely merged in a replicated environment. Importantly, because these specifications only address a data type's (static) structural properties, their formulation does not require exposing low-level system-level details concerning asynchrony, replication, visibility, etc. As a consequence, our framework enables the correct-by-construction synthesis of rich merge functions over arbitrarily complex (i.e., composable) data types. We show that the use of a rich relational specification language allows us to extract sufficient conditions to automatically derive merge functions that have meaningful non-trivial convergence properties. We incorporate these ideas in a tool called Quark, and demonstrate its utility via a detailed evaluation study on real-world benchmarks.