“They’re not that hard to mitigate”: What Cryptographic Library Developers Think About Timing Attacks

Result code in IS VaVaI

<a href="https://www.isvavai.cz/riv?ss=detail&h=RIV%2F00216224%3A14330%2F22%3A00125058" target="_blank" >RIV/00216224:14330/22:00125058 - isvavai.cz</a>

Result on the web

<a href="https://crocs.fi.muni.cz/public/papers/usablect_sp22" target="_blank" >https://crocs.fi.muni.cz/public/papers/usablect_sp22</a>

DOI - Digital Object Identifier

<a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/SP46214.2022.9833713" target="_blank" >10.1109/SP46214.2022.9833713</a>

Result language

angličtina

Original language name

“They’re not that hard to mitigate”: What Cryptographic Library Developers Think About Timing Attacks

Original language description

Timing attacks are among the most devastating side- channel attacks, allowing remote attackers to retrieve secret material, including cryptographic keys, with relative ease. In principle, “these attacks are not that hard to mitigate”: the basic intuition, captured by the constant-time criterion, is that control- flow and memory accesses should be independent from secrets. Furthermore, there is a broad range of tools for automatically checking adherence to this intuition. Yet, these attacks still plague popular crypto libraries twenty-five years after their discovery, reflecting a dangerous gap between academic research and crypto engineering. This gap can potentially undermine the emerging shift towards high-assurance, formally verified crypto libraries. However, the causes for this gap remain uninvestigated. To understand the causes of this gap, we conducted a survey with 44 developers of 27 prominent open-source cryptographic libraries. The goal of the survey was to analyze if and how the developers ensure that their code executes in constant time. Our main findings are that developers are aware of timing attacks and of their potentially dramatic consequences and yet often prioritize other issues over the perceived huge investment of time and resources currently needed to make their code resistant to timing attacks. Based on the survey, we identify several shortcomings in existing analysis tools for constant-time, and issue recommendations that can make writing constant- time libraries less difficult. Our recommendations can inform future development of analysis tools, security-aware compilers, and crypto libraries, not only for constant-timeness, but in the broader context of side-channel attacks, in particular for micro- architectural side-channel attacks.

Czech name

—

Czech description

—

Type

D - Article in proceedings

CEP classification

—

OECD FORD branch

10201 - Computer sciences, information science, bioinformathics (hardware development to be 2.2, social aspect to be 5.8)

Project

<a href="/en/project/GA20-03426S" target="_blank" >GA20-03426S: Examining and improving security of elliptic curve cryptography</a><br>

Continuities

P - Projekt vyzkumu a vyvoje financovany z verejnych zdroju (s odkazem do CEP)<br>S - Specificky vyzkum na vysokych skolach

Publication year

2022

Confidentiality

S - Úplné a pravdivé údaje o projektu nepodléhají ochraně podle zvláštních právních předpisů

Article name in the collection

43rd IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy

ISBN

9781665413169

ISSN

2375-1207

e-ISSN

1081-6011

Number of pages

18

Pages from-to

632-649

Publisher name

IEEE

Place of publication

San Francisco

Event location

San Francisco, CA, US

Event date

May 22, 2022

Type of event by nationality

WRD - Celosvětová akce

UT code for WoS article

000852887300037