Kai Cong

Li Lei, Kai Cong, Zhenkun Yang et al.

Hardware/Software (HW/SW) interfaces, mostly implemented as devices and device drivers, are pervasive in various computer systems. Nowadays HW/SW interfaces typically undergo intensive testing and validation before release, but they are still unreliable and insecure when deployed together with computer systems to end users. Escaped logic bugs, hardware transient failures, and malicious exploits are prevalent in HW/SW interactions, making the entire system vulnerable and unstable. We present HW/SW co-monitoring, a runtime co-verification approach to detecting failures and malicious exploits in device/driver interactions. Our approach utilizes a formal device model (FDM), a transaction-level model derived from the device specification, to shadow the real device execution. Based on the co-execution of the device and FDM, HW/SW co-monitoring carries out two-tier runtime checking: (1) device checking checks if the device behaviors conform to the FDM behaviors; (2) property checking detects invalid driver commands issued to the device by verifying system properties against driver/device interactions. We have applied HW/SW co-monitoring to five widely-used devices and their Linux drivers, discovering 9 real bugs and vulnerabilities while introducing modest runtime overhead. The results demonstrate the major potential of HW/SW co-monitoring in improving system reliability and security.

Gorka Irazoqui, Kai Cong, Xiaofei Guo et al.

This work presents a new tool to verify the correctness of cryptographic implementations with respect to cache attacks. Our methodology discovers vulnerabilities that are hard to find with other techniques, observed as exploitable leakage. The methodology works by identifying secret dependent memory and introducing forced evictions inside potentially vulnerable code to obtain cache traces that are analyzed using Mutual Information. If dependence is observed, the cryptographic implementation is classified as to leak information. We demonstrate the viability of our technique in the design of the three main cryptographic primitives, i.e., AES, RSA and ECC, in eight popular up to date cryptographic libraries, including OpenSSL, Libgcrypt, Intel IPP and NSS. Our results show that cryptographic code designers are far away from incorporating the appropriate countermeasures to avoid cache leakages, as we found that 50% of the default implementations analyzed leaked information that lead to key extraction. We responsibly notified the designers of all the leakages found and suggested patches to solve these vulnerabilities.