Meng Wu

Shengjian Guo, Yueqi Chen, Peng Li et al.

CPU cache is a limited but crucial storage component in modern processors, whereas the cache timing side-channel may inadvertently leak information through the physically measurable timing variance. Speculative execution, an essential processor optimization, and a source of such variances, can cause severe detriment on deliberate branch mispredictions. Despite static analysis could qualitatively verify the timing-leakage-free property under speculative execution, it is incapable of producing endorsements including inputs and speculated flows to diagnose leaks in depth. This work proposes a new symbolic execution based method, SpecuSym, for precisely detecting cache timing leaks introduced by speculative execution. Given a program (leakage-free in non-speculative execution), SpecuSymsystematically explores the program state space, models speculative behavior at conditional branches, and accumulates the cache side effects along with subsequent path explorations. During the dynamic execution, SpecuSymconstructs leak predicates for memory visits according to the specified cache model and conducts a constraint-solving based cache behavior analysis to inspect the new cache behaviors. We have implementedSpecuSymatop KLEE and evaluated it against 15 open-source benchmarks. Experimental results show thatSpecuSymsuccessfully detected from 2 to 61 leaks in 6 programs under 3 different cache settings and identified false positives in 2 programs reported by recent work.

Meng Wu, Jingbo Wang, Jyotirmoy Deshmukh et al.

Cyber-physical systems are often safety-critical in that violations of safety properties may lead to catastrophes. We propose a method to enforce the safety of systems with real-valued signals by synthesizing a runtime enforcer called the shield. Whenever the system violates a property, the shield, composed with the system, makes correction instantaneously to ensure that no erroneous output is generated by the combined system. While techniques for synthesizing Boolean shields are well understood, they do not handle real-valued signals ubiquitous in cyber-physical systems, meaning corrections may be either unrealizable or inefficient to compute in the real domain. We solve the realizability and efficiency problems by statically analyzing the compatibility of predicates defined over real-valued signals, and using the analysis result to constrain a two-player safety game used to synthesize the shield. We have implemented the method and demonstrated its effectiveness and efficiency on a variety of applications, including an automotive powertrain control system.

Shengjian Guo, Meng Wu, Chao Wang

The timing characteristics of cache, a high-speed storage between the fast CPU and the slowmemory, may reveal sensitive information of a program, thus allowing an adversary to conduct side-channel attacks. Existing methods for detecting timing leaks either ignore cache all together or focus only on passive leaks generated by the program itself, without considering leaks that are made possible by concurrently running some other threads. In this work, we show that timing-leak-freedom is not a compositional property: a program that is not leaky when running alone may become leaky when interleaved with other threads. Thus, we develop a new method, named adversarial symbolic execution, to detect such leaks. It systematically explores both the feasible program paths and their interleavings while modeling the cache, and leverages an SMT solver to decide if there are timing leaks. We have implemented our method in LLVM and evaluated it on a set of real-world ciphers with 14,455 lines of C code in total. Our experiments demonstrate both the efficiency of our method and its effectiveness in detecting side-channel leaks.

Meng Wu, Shengjian Guo, Patrick Schaumont et al.

We propose a method, based on program analysis and transformation, for eliminating timing side channels in software code that implements security-critical applications. Our method takes as input the original program together with a list of secret variables (e.g., cryptographic keys, security tokens, or passwords) and returns the transformed program as output. The transformed program is guaranteed to be functionally equivalent to the original program and free of both instruction- and cache-timing side channels. Specifically, we ensure that the number of CPU cycles taken to execute any path is independent of the secret data, and the cache behavior of memory accesses, in terms of hits and misses, is independent of the secret data. We have implemented our method in LLVM and validated its effectiveness on a large set of applications, which are cryptographic libraries with 19,708 lines of C/C++ code in total. Our experiments show the method is both scalable for real applications and effective in eliminating timing side channels.