POPL 2026
Sun 11 - Sat 17 January 2026 Rennes, France
Sun 11 Jan 2026 16:00 - 16:18 at Salle 19 - Hardware Security Chair(s): Jérémy Thibault

The Spectre speculative side-channel attacks pose formidable threats for security. Research has shown that code following the cryptographic constant-time discipline can be efficiently protected against Spectre v1 using a selective variant of Speculative Load Hardening (SLH). SLH was, however, not strong enough for protecting non-cryptographic code, leading to the introduction of Ultimate SLH, which provides protection for arbitrary programs, but has too large overhead for general use, since it conservatively assumes that all data is secret. In recent work, we introduce a flexible SLH notion that achieves the best of both worlds by generalizing both Selective and Ultimate SLH. We give a suitable security definition for such transformations protecting arbitrary programs: any transformed program running with speculation should not leak more than what the source program leaks sequentially. We formally prove using the Rocq prover that two flexible SLH variants enforce this relative security guarantee. As easy corollaries, we also obtain that, in our setting, Ultimate SLH enforces our relative security notion, and Selective SLH enforces speculative constant-time security.

Abstract (eabstract.pdf)80KiB
Slides (slides.pdf)3.10MiB

Sun 11 Jan

Displayed time zone: Brussels, Copenhagen, Madrid, Paris change

16:00 - 17:30
Hardware SecurityPriSC at Salle 19
Chair(s): Jérémy Thibault EPFL
16:00
18m
Talk
FSLH: Flexible Mechanized Speculative Load Hardening
PriSC
Jonathan Baumann Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy (MPI-SP), Roberto Blanco Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy (MPI-SP), Léon Ducruet Aarhus University, Sebastian Harwig MPI-SP and Ruhr University Bochum, Cătălin Hriţcu MPI-SP
File Attached
16:18
18m
Talk
Towards Robust Secure Compilation in Presence of Speculative Execution
PriSC
Léopold Clément Télécom Paris, Ulrich Kühne Télécom Paris, Florian Brandner Télécom Paris, Renaud Pacalet Télécom Paris
16:36
18m
Talk
Compiling countermeasures against fault attacks with “Tracing LLVM”
PriSC
Sébastien Michelland Inria Rennes, Christophe Deleuze Université Grenoble-Alpes - Grenoble INP - LCIS, Laure Gonnord Université Grenoble-Alpes - Grenoble INP - LCIS
File Attached
16:54
18m
Talk
Modular and automatic formal verification of a RISC-V processor with security mechanisms
PriSC
Pierre Wilke CentraleSupélec, Cyprien Jules CentraleSupélec, Inria, CNRS, Univ. Rennes, Guillaume Hiet CentraleSupélec, Inria, CNRS, Univ. Rennes
17:12
18m
Talk
Fun with flags: How Compilers Break and Fix Constant-Time Code
PriSC
Antoine Geimer Univ. Lille, CNRS, Inria, Clémentine Maurice Univ. Lille, Inria, CNRS