ABSTRACT. In this paper we describe symbolic side-channel analysis techniques for detecting and quantifying information leakage, given in terms of Shannon and Min Entropy. Measuring the precise leakage is challenging due to the randomness and noise often present in program executions and side-channel observations. We account for this noise by introducing additional (symbolic) program inputs which are interpreted {\em probabilistically}, using symbolic execution with {\em parameterized} model counting. We also explore an approximate sampling approach for increased scalability. In contrast to typical Monte Carlo techniques, our approach works by sampling symbolic paths, representing multiple concrete paths, and uses pruning to accelerate computation and guarantee convergence to the optimal results. The key novelty of our approach is to provide bounds on the leakage that are provably under- and over-approximating the real leakage. We implemented the techniques in the Symbolic PathFinder tool and we demonstrate them on Java programs.

ABSTRACT. Software-based countermeasures provide effective mitigation against side-channel attacks, often with minimal efficiency and deployment overheads. Their effectiveness is often amenable to rigorous analysis: specifically, several popular countermeasures can be formalized as information flow policies, and correct implementation of the countermeasures can be verified with state-of-the-art analysis and verification techniques. However, in absence of further justification, the guarantees only hold for the language (source, target, or intermediate representation) on which the analysis is performed.

We consider the problem of preserving side-channel countermeasures by compilation for cryptographic “constant-time”, a popular countermeasure against cache-based timing attacks. We present a general method, based on the notion of 2-simulation, for proving that a compilation pass preserves the constant-time countermeasure. Using the Coq proof assistant, we verify the correctness of our method and of several representative instantiations.

ABSTRACT. ProVerif is a popular tool for the fully automatic analysis of security protocols, offering very good support to detect flaws or prove security. One exception is the case of protocols with global states such as counters, tables, or more generally, memory cells. ProVerif fails to analyse such protocols, due to its internal abstraction.

Our key idea is to devise a generic transformation of the security properties queried to ProVerif. We prove the soundness of our transformation and implement it into a front-end GBVerif. Our experiments show that our front-end (combined with ProVerif) outperforms the few existing tools, both in terms of efficiency and protocol coverage. We successfully apply our tool to a dozen of protocols of the literature, yielding the first fully automatic proof of a security API and a payment protocol of the literature.

ABSTRACT. Exclusive-or (XOR) operations are common in cryptographic protocols, in particular in RFID protocols and electronic payment protocols. Although there are numerous applications, due to the inherent complexity of faithful models of XOR, there is only limited tool support for the verification of cryptographic protocols using XOR.

The Tamarin prover is a state-of-the-art verification tool for cryptographic protocols in the symbolic model. In this paper, we improve the underlying theory and the tool to deal with an equational theory modeling XOR operations. The XOR theory can be freely combined with all equational theories previously supported, including user-defined equational theories. This makes Tamarin the first tool to support simultaneously this large set of equational theories, protocols with global mutable state, an unbounded number of sessions, and complex security properties including observational equivalence. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by analyzing several protocols that rely on XOR, in particular multiple RFID-protocols, where we can identify attacks as well as provide proofs.

ABSTRACT. There are several typing results that, for certain classes of protocols, show it is without loss of attacks to restrict the intruder to sending only well-typed messages. So far, all these typing results hold only for relatively simple protocols that do not keep a state beyond single sessions, excluding stateful protocols that, e.g., maintain long-term databases. Recently, several verification tools for stateful protocols have been proposed, e.g., Set-pi, AIF-omega, and SAPIC/Tamarin, but for none of these a typing result has been established. The main contribution of this paper is a typing result, for a large class of stateful protocols, based on a symbolic protocol model. We illustrate how to connect several formalisms for stateful protocols to this symbolic model. Finally, we discuss how the conditions of our typing result apply to existing protocols, or can be achieved by minor modifications.