SECOMP: Formally Secure Compilation of Compartmentalized C Programs

Jérémy Thibault; Roberto Blanco; Dongjae Lee; Sven Argo; Arthur Azevedo de Amorim; Aïna Linn Georges; Catalin Hritcu; Andrew Tolmach

arXiv · 2401.16277

SECOMP: Formally Secure Compilation of Compartmentalized C Programs

Jérémy Thibault·Roberto Blanco·Dongjae Lee·Sven Argo·Arthur Azevedo de Amorim·Aïna Linn Georges·Catalin Hritcu·Andrew Tolmach

View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

Undefined behavior in C often causes devastating security vulnerabilities. One practical mitigation is compartmentalization, which allows developers to structure large programs into mutually distrustful compartments with clearly specified privileges and interactions. In this paper we introduce SECOMP, a compiler for compartmentalized C code that comes with machine-checked proofs guaranteeing that the scope of undefined behavior is restricted to the compartments that encounter it and become dynamically compromised. These guarantees are formalized as the preservation of safety properties against adversarial contexts, a secure compilation criterion similar to full abstraction, and this is the first time such a strong criterion is proven for a mainstream programming language. To achieve this we extend the languages of the CompCert verified C compiler with isolated compartments that can only interact via procedure calls and returns, as specified by cross-compartment interfaces. We adapt the passes and optimizations of CompCert as well as their correctness proofs to this compartment-aware setting. We then use compiler correctness as an ingredient in a larger secure compilation proof that involves several proof engineering novelties, needed to scale formally secure compilation up to a C compiler.

Explore related subjects

cs.PL cs.CR

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeX RIS

Jérémy Thibault, Roberto Blanco, Dongjae Lee, Sven Argo, Arthur Azevedo de Amorim, Aïna Linn Georges, Catalin Hritcu, Andrew Tolmach. 2025-01-01. SECOMP: Formally Secure Compilation of Compartmentalized C Programs. https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.16277

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

Expressive power of one-shot control operators and coroutines

Control operators, such as exceptions and effect handlers, provide a means of representing computational effects in programs abstractly and modularly. While most theoretical studies have focused on multi-shot control operators, one-shot control operators---which restrict the use of captured continuations to at most once---are gaining attention for their balance between expressiveness and efficiency. This study aims to fill the gap. We present a mathematically rigorous comparison of the expressive power among one-shot control operators, including effect handlers, delimited continuations, and even asymmetric coroutines. Following previous studies on multi-shot control operators, we adopt Felleisen's macro-expressiveness as our measure of expressiveness. We verify the folklore that one-shot effect handlers and one-shot delimited-control operators can be macro-expressed by asymmetric coroutines, but not vice versa. We explain why a previous informal argument fails, and how to revise it to make a valid macro-translation.

cs.PL↗

arXiv2026

Authorization Revocation for Long-Running AI Agents: Root-Scoped Quiescence under Delegation and Asynchronous Execution

Long-running AI agents outlive initiating processes through credentials, delegated tasks, queues, callbacks, reservations, and provider-side operations. Cancellation, process exit, and credential revocation neither close every pre-cut carrier nor distinguish independently authorized shared work. We define root-scoped authorization quiescence: for each manifested sink, a certificate accounts for every cut-relevant acceptance under the retired root-epoch atom that precedes its local fence and excludes protected acceptance under that atom after the fence, while permitting exact rebind to a current, independently sufficient support. The root-scoped quiescence protocol linearizes a root cut, fences old-root expansion and protected sinks, represents alternative and conjunctive authority as antichains of minimal sufficient root sets, and composes provider-frontier certificates into a cutset over registered old-root paths. Exact channel-token accounting reconciles transfers; missing or conflicting evidence remains indeterminate. Under stated assumptions, we prove post-cut issuer non-expansion, support-sound projection, compositional soundness under exact channel conservation, independent-support preservation, merge-order independence, and crash/replay stability. A provider-free late-effect test suite matches 17/17 registered outcomes. Two cancellation-only and one cut-only execution accept the same class of already scheduled late effect; two cut-plus-fence executions, one restart, and one stale-process execution reject it. A separately implemented checker verifies 17/17 traces and rejects 44/44 consistently rehashed semantic regressions. The certificate establishes root-relative authorization quiescence within its bound manifest and configuration, not global idleness, rollback, or business completion.

cs.PL↗

arXiv2026

Soda: An Object-Oriented Functional Language for Specifying Human-Centered Problems

We present Soda (Symbolic Objective Descriptive Analysis), a language that helps to treat qualities and quantities in a natural way and greatly simplifies the task of checking correctness. We present key properties for the language motivated by the design of a descriptive language to encode complex requirements on computer systems, and we explain how these key properties must be addressed to model these requirements with simple definitions. We give an overview of a tool that helps to describe problems in an easy way, which we consider more transparent and less error-prone.

cs.PL↗