Certified Side Channels
This addresses security risks for users of cryptographic software by exposing vulnerabilities in key parsing, though it is incremental in building on known side-channel analysis techniques.
The paper tackled the problem of side-channel vulnerabilities in private key persistence formats across software libraries, resulting in key recovery attacks using various signals like electromagnetic emanations and cache timings.
We demonstrate that the format in which private keys are persisted impacts Side Channel Analysis (SCA) security. Surveying several widely deployed software libraries, we investigate the formats they support, how they parse these keys, and what runtime decisions they make. We uncover a combination of weaknesses and vulnerabilities, in extreme cases inducing completely disjoint multi-precision arithmetic stacks deep within the cryptosystem level for keys that otherwise seem logically equivalent. Exploiting these vulnerabilities, we design and implement key recovery attacks utilizing signals ranging from electromagnetic (EM) emanations, to granular microarchitecture cache timings, to coarse traditional wall clock timings.