CacheAudit: a tool for the static analysis of cache side channels

  • Authors:
  • Goran Doychev;Dominik Feld;Boris Köpf;Laurent Mauborgne;Jan Reineke

  • Affiliations:
  • IMDEA Software Institute;Saarland University;IMDEA Software Institute;IMDEA Software Institute;Saarland University

  • Venue:
  • SEC'13 Proceedings of the 22nd USENIX conference on Security
  • Year:
  • 2013

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Abstract

We present CacheAudit, a versatile framework for the automatic, static analysis of cache side channels. Cache-Audit takes as input a program binary and a cache configuration, and it 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 information that is revealed. In case studies we apply CacheAudit to binary executables of algorithms for symmetric encryption and sorting, obtaining the first formal proofs of security for implementations with countermeasures such as preloading and data-independent memory access patterns.