Sockeye: a language for analyzing hardware documentation

📝 Original Info

• Title: Sockeye: a language for analyzing hardware documentation
• ArXiv ID: 2510.27485
• Date: 2025-10-31
• Authors: 정보가 제공되지 않음 (논문에 명시된 저자 정보를 확인해 주세요.)

📝 Abstract

Systems programmers have to consolidate the ever growing hardware mess present on modern System-on-Chips (SoCs). Correctly programming a multitude of components, providing functionality but also security, is a difficult problem: semantics of individual units are described in English prose, descriptions are often underspecified, and prone to inaccuracies. Rigorous statements about platform security are often impossible. We introduce a domain-specific language to describe hardware semantics, assumptions about software behavior, and desired security properties. We then create machine-readable specifications for a diverse set of eight SoCs from their reference manuals, and formally prove their (in-)security. In addition to security proofs about memory confidentiality and integrity, we discover a handful of documentation errors. Finally, our analysis also revealed a vulnerability on a real-world server chip. Our tooling offers system integrators a way of formally describing security properties for entire SoCs, and means to prove them or find counterexamples to them.

💡 Deep Analysis

📄 Full Content

Reference