The Tome of Secure Compilation: Fully Abstract Compilation to Protected Modules Architectures ; Het boek van veilige compilatie: Volledig abstracte compilatie naar beschermende modulearchitecturen

Mature manhood: that means to have rediscovered the seriousness one had as a child at play. Friedrich Nietzsche Beyond Good and Evil Part IV Aphorism 94 A compiler is a complex software artefact that, among other things, translates programs written in a source-level language into programs written in a targetlevel one. Source-level programming languages often provide programmers with means to define and enforce security policies. However, this does not always hold for target languages, so compilers do not always have the means to translate secure source programs into secure target programs. When security policies are not preserved by a compiler during the language translation, the generated target-level code can be subject to malicious security-breaching attacks. When security is preserved by a compiler, however, source-level security policies cannot be violated in the generated target-level code. A compiler that preserves sourcelevel security policies in the target-level programs it generates is called a secure compiler. This thesis then presents a secure compiler from an object-oriented Javalike language to untyped assembly code extended with protected module architectures (PMA) – an isolation mechanism of modern processors. To prove that compiler secure, it is proven to be fully abstract, so it preserves (and reflects) the behaviour of the programs it compiles. Since the behaviour of programs captures also the security policies of that program, a fully abstract compiler is a secure one. This thesis also studies the behaviour for untyped assembly code extended with PMA in terms of trace semantics. Two such trace semantics are developed in