Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2013/253

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

Goran Doychev and Dominik Feld and Boris Köpf and Laurent Mauborgne and Jan Reineke

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 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 over-approximations 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.

Category / Keywords: implementation / AES, Cache Side Channels, Program Analysis

Date: received 3 May 2013

Contact author: boris koepf at imdea org

Available format(s): PDF | BibTeX Citation

Version: 20130508:201620 (All versions of this report)

Short URL: ia.cr/2013/253