Verifying linearizability of intel® software guard extensions

Abstract

Intel® Software Guard Extensions (SGX) is a collection of CPU instructions that enable an application to create secure containers that are inaccessible to untrusted entities, including the operating system and other low-level software. Establishing that the design of these instructions provides security is critical to the success of the feature, however, SGX introduces complex concurrent interactions between the instructions and the shared hardware state used to enforce security, rendering traditional approaches to validation insufficient. In this paper, we introduce Accordion, a domain specific language and compiler for automatically verifying linearizability via model checking. The compiler determines an appropriate linearization point for each instruction, computes the required linearizability assertions, and supports experimentation with a variety of model configurations across multiple model checking tools. We show that this approach to verifying linearizability works well for validating SGX and that the compiler provides improved usability over encoding the problem in a model checker directly.