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

Kód výsledku v 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>

Výsledek na webu

<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>

Jazyk výsledku

angličtina

Název v původním jazyce

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

Popis výsledku v původním jazyce

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.

Název v anglickém jazyce

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

Popis výsledku anglicky

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.

Druh

D - Stať ve sborníku

CEP obor

—

OECD FORD obor

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

Projekt

<a href="/cs/project/GA20-03426S" target="_blank" >GA20-03426S: Ověření a zlepšení bezpečnosti kryptografie eliptických křivek</a><br>

Návaznosti

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

Rok uplatnění

2022

Kód důvěrnosti údajů

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

Název statě ve sborníku

43rd IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy

ISBN

9781665413169

ISSN

2375-1207

e-ISSN

1081-6011

Počet stran výsledku

18

Strana od-do

632-649

Název nakladatele

IEEE

Místo vydání

San Francisco

Místo konání akce

San Francisco, CA, US

Datum konání akce

22. 5. 2022

Typ akce podle státní příslušnosti

WRD - Celosvětová akce

Kód UT WoS článku

000852887300037