Related papers: Constant-Time Foundations for the New Spectre Era

The constant-time property is considered the security standard for cryptographic code. Code following the constant-time discipline is free from secret-dependent branches and memory accesses, and thus avoids leaking secrets through cache and…

Timing side-channel attacks exploit variations in program execution time to recover sensitive information. Cryptographic implementations are especially vulnerable to these attacks, since even small timing differences in operations such as…

We claim that existing techniques and tools for generating and verifying constant-time code are incomplete, since they rely on assumptions that compiler optimization passes do not break constant-timeness or that certain operations execute…

The PQDSS standardization process requires cryptographic primitives to be free from vulnerabilities, including timing and cache side-channels. Resistance to timing leakage is therefore an essential property, and achieving this typically…

Timing side-channel attacks exploit secret-dependent execution time to fully or partially recover secrets of cryptographic implementations, posing a severe threat to software security. Constant-time programming discipline is an effective…

The implementations of most hardened cryptographic libraries use defensive programming techniques for side-channel resistance. These techniques are usually specified as guidelines to developers on specific code patterns to use or avoid.…

Cryptographic research takes software timing side channels seriously. Approaches to mitigate them include constant-time coding and techniques to enforce such practices. However, recent attacks like Meltdown [42], Spectre [37], and…

This paper presents applicability of Strong Stationary Times (SST) techniques in the area of cryptography. The applicability is in three areas: *) Propositions of a new class of cryptographic algorithms (pseudo-random permutation…

Speculative execution attacks undermine the security of constant-time programming, the standard technique used to prevent microarchitectural side channels in security-sensitive software such as cryptographic code. Constant-time code must…

We propose ProSpeCT, a generic formal processor model providing provably secure speculation for the constant-time policy. For constant-time programs under a non-speculative semantics, ProSpeCT guarantees that speculative and out-of-order…

In the era of microarchitectural side channels, vendors scramble to deploy mitigations for transient execution attacks, but leave traditional side-channel attacks against sensitive software (e.g., crypto programs) to be fixed by developers…

The recent discovery of the Spectre and Meltdown attacks represents a watershed moment not just for the field of Computer Security, but also of Programming Languages. This paper explores speculative side-channel attacks and their…

Cryptographic libraries are a main target of timing side-channel attacks. A practical means to protect against these attacks is to adhere to the constant-time (CT) policy. However, it is hard to write constant-time code, and even…

Timed automata are a common formalism for the verification of concurrent systems subject to timing constraints. They extend finite-state automata with clocks, that constrain the system behavior in locations, and to take transitions. While…

Formal verification of software and compilers has been used to rule out large classes of security-critical issues, but risk of unintentional information leakage has received much less consideration. It is a key requirement for formal…

This paper investigates the critical-time criteria as a security metric for controlled systems subject to sharp input anomalies (attack, fault), characterized by having high impact in a reduced amount of time (e.g. denial-of-service, attack…

Spectre vulnerabilities violate our fundamental assumptions about architectural abstractions, allowing attackers to steal sensitive data despite previously state-of-the-art countermeasures. To defend against Spectre, developers of…

Conventional approaches for ensuring the security of application software at run-time, through monitoring, either produce (high rates of) false alarms (e.g. intrusion detection systems) or limit application performance (e.g. run-time…

We propose a novel type system for verifying that programs correctly implement constant-resource behavior. Our type system extends recent work on automatic amortized resource analysis (AARA), a set of techniques that automatically derive…

To be secure, cryptographic algorithms crucially rely on the underlying hardware to avoid inadvertent leakage of secrets through timing side channels. Unfortunately, such timing channels are ubiquitous in modern hardware, due to its…