Information flow security on persistent memory

2026-06-24

AI Summary

Persistent memory architectures lack formal guarantees for information flow security, as existing research primarily emphasizes functional correctness while neglecting security properties. To address this gap, this work presents the first integration of formal information flow logic with Reordering Interference Freedom (RIF) to construct an information flow analysis framework tailored for unstructured control flows—such as those involving goto statements or x86 assembly code. The approach explicitly models the impact of instruction reordering on information flows in persistent memory and provides a unified treatment of information flow security across both traditional and persistent memory settings. This enables provably secure verification of information flow properties for x86 assembly programs executing in persistent memory environments, thereby extending the applicability boundary of formal security verification techniques.

Abstract

Persistent memory is a recently proposed memory paradigm that delivers many system-wide benefits, including improved runtime efficiency and the ability of programs to recover from power outages and system crashes. While recent research has investigated techniques for proving functional correctness of programs running on related architectures, this is not the case for the orthogonal concept of information flow security. In this paper, we provide an information flow logic for an unstructured language (i.e., with gotos rather than loops) modelling a simple assembly language. We apply this logic to x86 assembly using a notion of reordering interference freedom (rif) to reason about potential out-of-order propagation of instructions to memory. We then show how this same notion of rif can be used to similarly reason about information flow on persistent memory.

Problem

• information flow security
• persistent memory
• reordering interference freedom
• x86 assembly
• memory consistency

Innovation

• information flow security
• persistent memory
• reordering interference freedom
• formal verification
• x86 assembly