scholarly journals SpecSafe: detecting cache side channels in a speculative world

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (OOPSLA) ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
Robert Brotzman ◽  
Danfeng Zhang ◽  
Mahmut Taylan Kandemir ◽  
Gang Tan

The high-profile Spectre attack and its variants have revealed that speculative execution may leave secret-dependent footprints in the cache, allowing an attacker to learn confidential data. However, existing static side-channel detectors either ignore speculative execution, leading to false negatives, or lack a precise cache model, leading to false positives. In this paper, somewhat surprisingly, we show that it is challenging to develop a speculation-aware static analysis with precise cache models: a combination of existing works does not necessarily catch all cache side channels. Motivated by this observation, we present a new semantic definition of security against cache-based side-channel attacks, called Speculative-Aware noninterference (SANI), which is applicable to a variety of attacks and cache models. We also develop SpecSafe to detect the violations of SANI. Unlike other speculation-aware symbolic executors, SpecSafe employs a novel program transformation so that SANI can be soundly checked by speculation-unaware side-channel detectors. SpecSafe is shown to be both scalable and accurate on a set of moderately sized benchmarks, including commonly used cryptography libraries.

2019 ◽  
Vol 61 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-28
Author(s):  
Florian Bache ◽  
Christina Plump ◽  
Jonas Wloka ◽  
Tim Güneysu ◽  
Rolf Drechsler

Abstract Side-channel attacks enable powerful adversarial strategies against cryptographic devices and encounter an ever-growing attack surface in today’s world of digitalization and the internet of things. While the employment of provably secure side-channel countermeasures like masking have become increasingly popular in recent years, great care must be taken when implementing these in actual devices. The reasons for this are two-fold: The models on which these countermeasures rely do not fully capture the physical reality and compliance with the requirements of the countermeasures is non-trivial in complex implementations. Therefore, it is imperative to validate the SCA-security of concrete instantiations of cryptographic devices using measurements on the actual device. In this article we propose a side-channel evaluation framework that combines an efficient data acquisition process with state-of-the-art confidence interval based leakage assessment. Our approach allows a sound assessment of the potential susceptibility of cryptographic implementations to side-channel attacks and is robust against noise in the evaluation system. We illustrate the steps in the evaluation process by applying them to a protected implementation of AES.


: Advanced encryption standard is detailing for data crypto graphing. The algorithm used universally for cryptography and secure data transmission, the algorithm puissant to intruders, who often attack via side channels. One of the observed attacks was estimate the power implanted in AES core and processed probable scrutinizing to guess the key on multiple iterations. So in order to elude side channel attacks and reduce power consumed in AES standard, design proposed with masking and pipeline scheme. This design helps in shrinking power consumption as compare to AES algorithm and upgrade to withstand from attacks. Another major improvement in the design is LUT’s used for masking and original algorithm almost equal, area phenomenon also solved out. The proposed algorithm implemented in VERTEX-7 FPGA board and simulated using Xilinx Vivado 2015.2 and Modelsim.


Entropy ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 21 (8) ◽  
pp. 781
Author(s):  
Bagus Santoso ◽  
Yasutada Oohama

In this paper, we propose a theoretical framework to analyze the secure communication problem for broadcasting two encrypted sources in the presence of an adversary which launches side-channel attacks. The adversary is not only allowed to eavesdrop the ciphertexts in the public communication channel, but is also allowed to gather additional information on the secret keys via the side-channels, physical phenomenon leaked by the encryption devices during the encryption process, such as the fluctuations of power consumption, heat, or electromagnetic radiation generated by the encryption devices. Based on our framework, we propose a countermeasure against such adversary by using the post-encryption-compression (PEC) paradigm, in the case of one-time-pad encryption. We implement the PEC paradigm using affine encoders constructed from linear encoders and derive the explicit the sufficient conditions to attain the exponential decay of the information leakage as the block lengths of encrypted sources become large. One interesting feature of the proposed countermeasure is that its performance is independent from the type of side information leaked by the encryption devices.


Author(s):  
Wubing Wang ◽  
Guoxing Chen ◽  
Yueqiang Cheng ◽  
Yinqian Zhang ◽  
Zhiqiang Lin

AbstractThis paper presents Specularizer, a framework for uncovering speculative execution attacks using performance tracing features available in commodity processors. It is motivated by the practical difficulty of eradicating such vulnerabilities in the design of CPU hardware and operating systems and the principle of defense-in-depth. The key idea of Specularizer is the use of Hardware Performance Counters and Processor Trace to perform lightweight monitoring of production applications and the use of machine learning techniques for identifying the occurrence of the attacks during offline forensics analysis. Different from prior works that use performance counters to detect side-channel attacks, Specularizer monitors triggers of the critical paths of the speculative execution attacks, thus making the detection mechanisms robust to different choices of side channels used in the attacks. To evaluate Specularizer, we model all known types of exception-based and misprediction-based speculative execution attacks and automatically generate thousands of attack variants. Experimental results show that Specularizer yields superior detection accuracy and the online tracing of Specularizer incur reasonable overhead.


Author(s):  
R. A. Mostovoy ◽  
A. B. Levina ◽  
D. M. Sleptsova ◽  
P. S. Borisenko

Currently, attacks on side channels are the main method of cryptanalysis, but despite this, these attacks have a very specific model of the attacker. As a result, the practical usage of side-channel attacks is sometimes disputable. The level of threat in each case should be assessed taking into account the individual characteristics of a specific target system. Client applications, such as mobile phone applications, are especially vulnerable due to easy access to the device, so it's required to pay sufficient attention to their security, since they are more accessible to the attacker and usually contain a large amount of confidential information. This study represents an assessment of the informativeness of signals from side channels received from mobile phones. The studies used not expensive equipment to minimize the requirements for the level of the attacker and, consequently, increase the applicability of the attack. This undoubtedly leads to the complication of the attacks, so the NICV algorithm was used to analyze the data obtained. The NICV (normalized interclass variance) algorithm can significantly improve the efficiency of the analysis of the traces obtained during an attack by reducing the number of points.


2021 ◽  
Vol 54 (6) ◽  
pp. 1-37
Author(s):  
Xiaoxuan Lou ◽  
Tianwei Zhang ◽  
Jun Jiang ◽  
Yinqian Zhang

Side-channel attacks have become a severe threat to the confidentiality of computer applications and systems. One popular type of such attacks is the microarchitectural attack, where the adversary exploits the hardware features to break the protection enforced by the operating system and steal the secrets from the program. In this article, we systematize microarchitectural side channels with a focus on attacks and defenses in cryptographic applications. We make three contributions. (1) We survey past research literature to categorize microarchitectural side-channel attacks. Since these are hardware attacks targeting software, we summarize the vulnerable implementations in software, as well as flawed designs in hardware. (2) We identify common strategies to mitigate microarchitectural attacks, from the application, OS, and hardware levels. (3) We conduct a large-scale evaluation on popular cryptographic applications in the real world and analyze the severity, practicality, and impact of side-channel vulnerabilities. This survey is expected to inspire side-channel research community to discover new attacks, and more importantly, propose new defense solutions against them.


2009 ◽  
Vol 19 (11) ◽  
pp. 2990-2998 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tao ZHANG ◽  
Ming-Yu FAN

2003 ◽  
Vol 38 (4) ◽  
pp. 47-56 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lei Luo ◽  
Ming-Yuan Zhu ◽  
Qing-Li Zhang

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document