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Creators/Authors contains: "Fallin, Chris"

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  1. Language-level guarantees---like module runtime isolation for WebAssembly (Wasm)---are only as strong as the compiler that produces a final, native-machine-specific executable. The process of lowering language-level constructions to ISA-specific instructions can introduce subtle bugs that violate security guarantees. In this paper, we present Crocus, a system for lightweight, modular verification of instruction-lowering rules within Cranelift, a production retargetable Wasm native code generator. We use Crocus to verify lowering rules that cover WebAssembly 1.0 support for integer operations in the ARM aarch64 backend. We show that Crocus can reproduce 3 known bugs (including a 9.9/10 severity CVE), identify 2 previously-unknown bugs and an underspecified compiler invariant, and help analyze the root causes of a new bug. 
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  2. Hardware-assisted Fault Isolation (HFI) is a minimal extension to current processors that supports secure, flexible, and efficient in-process isolation. HFI addresses the limitations of software-based fault isolation (SFI) systems including: runtime overheads, limited scalability, vulnerability to Spectre attacks, and limited compatibility with existing code and binaries. HFI can be seamlessly integrated into exisiting SFI systems (e.g. WebAssembly), or directly sandbox unmodified native binaries. To ease adoption, HFI proposes incremental changes to existing high-performance processors. 
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  3. We introduce Hardware-assisted Fault Isolation (HFI), a simple extension to existing processors to support secure, flexible, and efficient in-process isolation. HFI addresses the limitations of existing software-based isolation (SFI) systems including: runtime overheads, limited scalability, vulnerability to Spectre attacks, and limited compatibility with existing code. HFI can seamlessly integrate with current SFI systems (e.g., WebAssembly), or directly sandbox unmodi!ed native binaries. To ease adoption, HFI relies only on incremental changes to the data and control path of existing high-performance processors. We evaluate HFI for x86-64 using the gem5 simulator and compiler-based emulation on a mix of real and synthetic workloads. 
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