Principled Side Channel Vulnerability Detection and Mitigation

Overview

Side-channel attacks recover secret information by analyzing the physical implementation of cryptosystems based on non-functional computational characteristics, e.g., time, power, and memory usage. Among all wellknown side channels, cache-based timing channels are notoriously severe, leading to practical attacks against certain implementations of theoretically secure crypto algorithms, such as RSA, ElGamal and AES. Such attacks target the hierarchical design of the modern computer memory system, where different memory access patterns of a program can bring observable timing difference. In this project, we systematically study how to detect and mitigate side-channel vulnerabilities.

People

• Dinghao Wu
• Danfeng Zhang
• Qinkun Bao
• Zihao Wang
• Xiao Liu

Former Project Members

• Pei Wang
• Shuai Wang

Publications

• Abacus: Precise Side-Channel Analysis, by Qinkun Bao*, Zihao Wang*, Xiaoting Li*, James Larus, and Dinghao Wu. In Proceedings of the 43rd International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2021).

• Identifying Cache-Based Side Channels through Secret-Augmented Abstract Interpretation, by Shuai Wang*, Yuyan Bao*, Xiao Liu*, Pei Wang*, Danfeng Zhang, and Dinghao Wu. In Proceedings of the 28th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security '19), Santa Clara, CA, August 14-16, 2019. An extended version is available at arXiv.
• CacheD: Identifying Cache-Based Timing Channels in Production Software, by Shuai Wang*, Pei Wang*, Xiao Liu*, Danfeng Zhang, and Dinghao Wu. In Proceedings of the 26th USENIX Security Symposium, Vancouver, BC, Canada, August 16-18, 2017. (Acceptance rate 85/522=16.3%)

Sponsor

National Science Foundation (NSF) — Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace (SaTC)

CAREER: Advanced Trace-oriented Binary Code Analysis, Dinghao Wu (PI), National Science Foundation (NSF) CNS-1652790, $494,703, 2017-2022.