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A Systematic Study of Cache Side Channels Across AES Implementations

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Engineering Secure Software and Systems (ESSoS 2017)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 10379))

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Abstract

While the AES algorithm is regarded as secure, many implementations of AES are prone to cache side-channel attacks. The lookup tables traditionally used in AES implementations for storing precomputed results provide speedup for encryption and decryption. How such lookup tables are used is known to affect the vulnerability to side channels, but the concrete effects in actual AES implementations are not yet sufficiently well understood. In this article, we analyze and compare multiple off-the-shelf AES implementations wrt. their vulnerability to cache side-channel attacks. By applying quantitative program analysis techniques in a systematic fashion, we shed light on the influence of implementation techniques for AES on cache-side-channel leakage bounds.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    We round all leakage bounds up to one decimal place and truncate them to the maximum leakage of 256 bit (128 bit message and 128 bit key) throughout the article.

  2. 2.

    To support the reader in reading such diagrams, we connect the leakage bounds computed for adjacent cache sizes and the same attacker model by dashed lines.

  3. 3.

    For \(\mathrm {LibTomCrypt}\) AES and 2 KB cache size, the analysis ran out of memory.

  4. 4.

    Without cache locking, the preloaded table entries might be evicted from the cache by other processes [21, 22].

  5. 5.

    This can be realized using static cache locking if the cache size exceeds the total size of tables. One could consider dynamic cache locking [27] if the cache is too small.

  6. 6.

    The sequential composition of the functions crypto_stream_beforenm (beforenm.c) and crypto_stream_xor_afternm (xor_afternm.c) from NaCl in version 20110221.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Clémentine Maurice and the anonymous reviewers for helpful comments. We also thank Artem Starostin for inspiring discussions in the initial phase of this project and Xucheng Yin for his contributions to CacheAudit. This work has been funded by the DFG as part of the project Secure Refinement of Cryptographic Algorithms (E3) within the CRC 1119 CROSSING and was supported by Ramón y Cajal grant RYC-2014-16766, Spanish projects TIN2012-39391-C04-01 StrongSoft and TIN2015-70713-R DEDETIS, and Madrid regional project S2013/ICE-2731 N-GREENS.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computer Science Department, TU Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Germany

    Heiko Mantel & Alexandra Weber

  2. IMDEA Software Institute, Madrid, Spain

    Boris Köpf

Authors
  1. Heiko Mantel
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  2. Alexandra Weber
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Correspondence to Heiko Mantel or Alexandra Weber .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Paderborn, Paderborn, Germany

    Eric Bodden

  2. Purdue University, West Lafayette, USA

    Mathias Payer

  3. University of Cyprus, Nicosia, Cyprus

    Elias Athanasopoulos

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Mantel, H., Weber, A., Köpf, B. (2017). A Systematic Study of Cache Side Channels Across AES Implementations. In: Bodden, E., Payer, M., Athanasopoulos, E. (eds) Engineering Secure Software and Systems. ESSoS 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10379. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62105-0_14

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