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Predictive mitigation of timing channels in interactive systems

Published: 17 October 2011 Publication History

Abstract

Timing channels remain a difficult and important problem for information security. Recent work introduced predictive mitigation, a new way to mitigating leakage through timing channels; this mechanism works by predicting timing from past behavior, and then enforcing the predictions. This paper generalizes predictive mitigation to a larger and important class of systems: systems that receive input requests from multiple clients and deliver responses. The new insight is that timing predictions may be a function of any public information, rather than being a function simply of output events. Based on this insight, a more general mechanism and theory of predictive mitigation becomes possible. The result is that bounds on timing leakage can be tightened, achieving asymptotically logarithmic leakage under reasonable assumptions. By applying it to web applications, the generalized predictive mitigation mechanism is shown to be effective in practice.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CCS '11: Proceedings of the 18th ACM conference on Computer and communications security
    October 2011
    742 pages
    ISBN:9781450309486
    DOI:10.1145/2046707
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    Published: 17 October 2011

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    Author Tags

    1. information flow
    2. interactive systems
    3. mitigation
    4. timing channels

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    • (2024)Metadata Privacy Beyond Tunneling for Instant Messaging2024 IEEE 9th European Symposium on Security and Privacy (EuroS&P)10.1109/EuroSP60621.2024.00044(697-723)Online publication date: 8-Jul-2024
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    • (2020)Attacks and Defenses in Short-Range Wireless Technologies for IoTIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2020.29935538(88892-88932)Online publication date: 2020
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