Revisiting and Evaluating Software Side-channel Vulnerabilities and Countermeasures in Cryptographic Applications Tianwei Zhang Jun Jiang Yinqian Zhang Nanyang Technological University Two Sigma Investments, LP The Ohio State University
[email protected] [email protected] [email protected] Abstract—We systematize software side-channel attacks with three questions: (1) What are the common and distinct a focus on vulnerabilities and countermeasures in the cryp- features of various vulnerabilities? (2) What are common tographic implementations. Particularly, we survey past re- mitigation strategies? (3) What is the status quo of cryp- search literature to categorize vulnerable implementations, tographic applications regarding side-channel vulnerabili- and identify common strategies to eliminate them. We then ties? Past work only surveyed attack techniques and media evaluate popular libraries and applications, quantitatively [20–31], without offering unified summaries for software measuring and comparing the vulnerability severity, re- vulnerabilities and countermeasures that are more useful. sponse time and coverage. Based on these characterizations This paper provides a comprehensive characterization and evaluations, we offer some insights for side-channel of side-channel vulnerabilities and countermeasures, as researchers, cryptographic software developers and users. well as evaluations of cryptographic applications related We hope our study can inspire the side-channel research to side-channel attacks. We present this study in three di- community to discover new vulnerabilities, and more im- rections. (1) Systematization of literature: we characterize portantly, to fortify applications against them. the vulnerabilities from past work with regard to the im- plementations; for each vulnerability, we describe the root cause and the technique required to launch a successful 1.