research-article

CacheAudit: A Tool for the Static Analysis of Cache Side Channels

Authors:

Laurent Mauborgne,

Jan ReinekeAuthors Info & Claims

ACM Transactions on Information and System Security (TISSEC), Volume 18, Issue 1

Article No.: 4, Pages 1 - 32

https://doi.org/10.1145/2756550

Published: 09 June 2015 Publication History

Abstract

We present CacheAudit, a versatile framework for the automatic, static analysis of cache side channels. CacheAudit takes as input a program binary and a cache configuration and derives formal, quantitative security guarantees for a comprehensive set of side-channel adversaries, namely, those based on observing cache states, traces of hits and misses, and execution times. Our technical contributions include novel abstractions to efficiently compute precise overapproximations of the possible side-channel observations for each of these adversaries. These approximations then yield upper bounds on the amount of information that is revealed.

In case studies, we apply CacheAudit to binary executables of algorithms for sorting and encryption, including the AES implementation from the PolarSSL library, and the reference implementations of the finalists of the eSTREAM stream cipher competition. The results we obtain exhibit the influence of cache size, line size, associativity, replacement policy, and coding style on the security of the executables and include the first formal proofs of security for implementations with countermeasures such as preloading and data-independent memory access patterns.

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CacheAudit: A Tool for the Static Analysis of Cache Side Channels

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cover image ACM Transactions on Information and System Security

ACM Transactions on Information and System Security Volume 18, Issue 1

June 2015

126 pages

ISSN:1094-9224

EISSN:1557-7406

DOI:10.1145/2786062

Editor:
Gene Tsudik
University of California at Irvine, USA

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Copyright © 2015 ACM.

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 the author(s) 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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Publication History

Published: 09 June 2015

Accepted: 01 April 2015

Revised: 01 January 2015

Received: 01 August 2014

Published in TISSEC Volume 18, Issue 1

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Madrid Regional Project S2013/ICE-2731 N-GREENS
Spanish Project TIN2012-39391-C04-01 StrongSoft
German Research Council (DFG) as part of the Transregional Collaborative Research Center AVACS

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