Publications by Charly Nicolas Lucien Castes

Lightweight Hypervisor Verification: Putting the Hardware Burger on a Diet

Edouard Bugnion, Charly Nicolas Lucien Castes, Thomas Emile Bourgeat

Hypervisors are an essential part of our computing infrastructure, yet ensuring their correctness remains a significant challenge for the community. While several hypervisors have been formally verified using traditional methods, they have typically requir ...

ACM2025

Sharing is leaking: blocking transient-execution attacks with core-gapped confidential VMs

Charly Nicolas Lucien Castes

Confidential VMs on platforms such as Intel TDX, AMD SEV and Arm CCA promise greater security for cloud users against even a hypervisor-level attacker, but this promise has been shattered by repeated transient-execution vulnerabilities and CPU bugs. At the ...

ACM2024

Dynamic Linkers Are the Narrow Waist of Operating Systems

Adrien Ghosn, Charly Nicolas Lucien Castes

While software applications, programming languages, and hardware have changed, operating systems have not. Widely-used commodity operating systems are still modeled after the ones designed in the seventies. The accumulated burden of backward compatibility ...

Association for Computing Machinery2023

Creating Trust by Abolishing Hierarchies

Mathias Josef Payer, Edouard Bugnion, Evangelos Marios Kogias, Adrien Ghosn, Charly Nicolas Lucien Castes, Neelu Shivprakash Kalani, Yuchen Qian

Software is going through a trust crisis. Privileged code is no longer trusted and processes insufficiently protect user code from unverified libraries. While usually treated separately, confidential computing and program compartmentalization are both symp ...

Association for Computing Machinery2023

Decentralized in-order execution of a sequential task-based code for shared-memory architectures

Charly Nicolas Lucien Castes

The hardware complexity of modern machines makes the design of adequate programming models crucial for jointly ensuring performance, portability, and productivity in high-performance computing (HPC). Sequential task-based programming models paired with adv ...

IEEE COMPUTER SOC2022

Attestable Software Versioning for Stateful Confidential Computing

Edouard Bugnion, Charly Nicolas Lucien Castes

Trusted execution environments enable the creation of confidential and attestable enclaves that exclude the platform and service providers from the trusted base. From its initial attestable state, a stateful enclave such as a confidential database can hold ...

2022