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Side channel vulnerability metrics: the promise and the pitfalls

Published: 23 June 2013 Publication History

Abstract

Side-channels enable attackers to break a cipher by exploiting observable information from the cipher program's execution to infer its secret key. While some defenses have been proposed to protect information leakage due to certain side channels, the effectiveness of these defenses have mostly been given only qualitative analysis by their authors. It is desirable to have a general quantitative method and metric to evaluate a system's vulnerability to side-channel attacks.
In this paper, we define the features of a good side-channel leakage metric. We review a recently proposed metric called the Side-channel Vulnerability Factor (SVF) and discuss its merits and issues. We suggest the CSV metric, which tries to show how to overcome some of the shortcomings of the SVF metric, without completely changing its character. We use software cache side-channel attacks and defenses as an example to compare the metrics with known and measurable results on system leakiness.

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  1. Side channel vulnerability metrics: the promise and the pitfalls

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    HASP '13: Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Hardware and Architectural Support for Security and Privacy
    June 2013
    77 pages
    ISBN:9781450321181
    DOI:10.1145/2487726
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 23 June 2013

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    View all
    • (2024)Camouflage: Utility-Aware Obfuscation for Accurate Simulation of Sensitive Program TracesACM Transactions on Architecture and Code Optimization10.1145/365011021:2(1-23)Online publication date: 21-May-2024
    • (2024)Tail Victims in Termination Timing Channel Defenses Beyond Cryptographic Kernels2024 International Symposium on Secure and Private Execution Environment Design (SEED)10.1109/SEED61283.2024.00012(11-22)Online publication date: 16-May-2024
    • (2024)Plan Your Defense: A Comparative Analysis of Leakage Detection Methods on RISC-V CoresEmbedded Computer Systems: Architectures, Modeling, and Simulation10.1007/978-3-031-78380-7_12(139-151)Online publication date: 30-Jun-2024
    • (2023)Metior: A Comprehensive Model to Evaluate Obfuscating Side-Channel Defense SchemesProceedings of the 50th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture10.1145/3579371.3589073(1-16)Online publication date: 17-Jun-2023
    • (2023)Towards a metrics suite for evaluating cache side-channel vulnerabilityComputers and Security10.1016/j.cose.2023.103480135:COnline publication date: 1-Dec-2023
    • (2022)Evaluation on the Impact of Cache Parameter Selection in Access-Driven Cache AttacksElectronics10.3390/electronics1115234011:15(2340)Online publication date: 27-Jul-2022
    • (2022)HASTE: Software Security Analysis for Timing Attacks on Clear Hardware AssumptionIEEE Embedded Systems Letters10.1109/LES.2021.312561714:2(71-74)Online publication date: Jun-2022
    • (2021)Ghost ThreadProceedings of the Eleventh ACM Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy10.1145/3422337.3447846(233-244)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2021
    • (2021)An Overview of Hardware Security and Trust: Threats, Countermeasures, and Design ToolsIEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems10.1109/TCAD.2020.304797640:6(1010-1038)Online publication date: Jun-2021
    • (2021)IntroSpectreProceedings of the 48th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture10.1109/ISCA52012.2021.00073(874-887)Online publication date: 14-Jun-2021
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