International Association for Cryptologic Research

International Association
for Cryptologic Research

IACR News item: 06 June 2014

Gilles Barthe, Gustavo Betarte, Juan Diego Campo, Carlos Luna, David Pichardie
ePrint Report ePrint Report
Cache-based attacks are a class of side-channel attacks that are

particularly effective in virtualized or cloud-based environments,

where they have been used to recover secret keys from cryptographic

implementations. One common approach to thwart cache-based attacks is

to use \\emph{constant-time} implementations, i.e.\\, which do not

branch on secrets and do not perform memory accesses that depend on

secrets. However, there is no rigorous proof that constant-time

implementations are protected against concurrent cache-attacks in

virtualization platforms with shared cache; moreover, many prominent

implementations are not constant-time. An alternative approach is to

rely on system-level mechanisms. One recent such mechanism is stealth

memory, which provisions a small amount of private cache for programs

to carry potentially leaking computations securely. Stealth memory

induces a weak form of constant-time, called \\emph{S-constant-time},

which encompasses some widely used cryptographic

implementations. However, there is no rigorous analysis of stealth

memory and S-constant-time, and no tool support for checking if

applications are S-constant-time.

We propose a new information-flow analysis that checks if an x86

application executes in constant-time, or in

S-constant-time. Moreover, we prove that constant-time

(resp. S-constant-time) programs do not leak confidential information

through the cache to other operating systems executing concurrently on

virtualization platforms (resp. platforms supporting stealth

memory). The soundness proofs are based on new theorems of independent

interest, including isolation theorems for virtualization platforms

(resp. platforms supporting stealth memory), and proofs that

constant-time implementations (resp. S-constant-time implementations)

are non-interfering with respect to a strict information flow policy

which disallows that control flow and memory accesses depend on

secrets. We formalize our results using the \\textsf{Coq} proof

assistant and we demonstrate the effectiveness of our analyses on

cryptographic implementations, including PolarSSL AES, DES and RC4,

SHA256 and Salsa20.

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