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conference paper

Abacus: Precise Side-Channel Analysis

Bao, Qinkun
•
Wang, Zihao
•
Li, Xiaoting
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January 1, 2021
2021 Ieee/Acm 43Rd International Conference On Software Engineering (Icse 2021)
43rd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering - Software Engineering in Practice (ICSE-SEIP) / 43rd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering - New Ideas and Emerging Results (ICSE-NIER)

Side-channel attacks allow adversaries to infer sensitive information from non-functional characteristics. Prior side-channel detection work is able to identify numerous potential vulnerabilities. However, in practice, many such vulnerabilities leak a negligible amount of sensitive information, and thus developers are often reluctant to address them. Existing tools do not provide information to evaluate a leak's severity, such as the number of leaked bits. To address this issue, we propose a new program analysis method to precisely quantify the leaked information in a single-trace attack through side-channels. It can identify covert information flows in programs that expose confidential information and can reason about security flaws that would otherwise be difficult, if not impossible, for a developer to find. We model an attacker's observation of each leakage site as a constraint. We use symbolic execution to generate these constraints and then run Monte Carlo sampling to estimate the number of leaked bits for each leakage site. By applying the Central Limit Theorem, we provide an error bound for these estimations. We have implemented the technique in a tool called Abacus, which not only finds very fine-grained side-channel vulnerabilities but also estimates how many bits are leaked. Abacus outperforms existing dynamic side-channel detection tools in performance and accuracy. We evaluate Abacus on OpenSSL, mbedTLS, Libgcrypt, and Monocypher. Our results demonstrate that most reported vulnerabilities are difficult to exploit in practice and should be de-prioritized by developers. We also find several sensitive vulnerabilities that are missed by the existing tools. We confirm those vulnerabilities with manual checks and by contacting the developers.

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Type
conference paper
DOI
10.1109/ICSE43902.2021.00078
Web of Science ID

WOS:000684601800065

Author(s)
Bao, Qinkun
•
Wang, Zihao
•
Li, Xiaoting
•
Larus, James R.  
•
Wu, Dinghao
Date Issued

2021-01-01

Publisher

IEEE COMPUTER SOC

Publisher place

Los Alamitos

Journal
2021 Ieee/Acm 43Rd International Conference On Software Engineering (Icse 2021)
ISBN of the book

978-0-7381-1319-7

Series title/Series vol.

International Conference on Software Engineering

Start page

797

End page

809

Subjects

Computer Science, Software Engineering

•

Computer Science, Theory & Methods

•

Computer Science

•

attacks

Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
VLSC  
Event nameEvent placeEvent date
43rd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering - Software Engineering in Practice (ICSE-SEIP) / 43rd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering - New Ideas and Emerging Results (ICSE-NIER)

ELECTR NETWORK

May 25-28, 2021

Available on Infoscience
September 25, 2021
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/181672
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