Are Timing-Based Side-Channel Attacks Feasible in Shared, Modern Computing Hardware?

There exist various vulnerabilities in computing hardware that adversaries can exploit to mount attacks against the users of such hardware. Microarchitectural Attacks, the result of these vulnerabilities, take advantage of Microarchitectural performance of processor implementations, revealing hidden computing process. Leveraging Microarchitectural resources, adversaries can potentially launch Timing-Based Side-Channel Attacks in order to leak information via timing. In view of these security threats against computing hardware, we analyse current attacks that take advantage of Microarchitectural elements in shared computing hardware. Our analysis focuses only on Timing-Based Side-Channel Attacks against the components of modern PC platforms - with references being made also to other platforms when relevant - as opposed to any other variations of Side-Channel Attacks which have a broad application range. To this end, we analyse Timing Attacks performed against processor and cache components, again with references to other components when appropriate

A calculus of challenges and responses

This paper presents a novel approach for concisely abstracting authentication protocols and for subsequently analyzing those abstractions in a sound manner, i.e., deriving authentication guarantees for protocol abstractions suffices for proving these guarantees for the actual protocols. The abstractions are formalized in a process calculus which constitutes a higher-level abstraction of the ρ-spi calculus and is specifically tailored towards reasoning about challenge-response mechanisms within authentication protocols. Furthermore, it allows for expressing protocols without having to include details on the specific structure of exchanged messages. This in particular entails that many authentication protocols share a common abstraction so that a single validation of this abstraction already gives rise to security guarantees for all these protocols. Such an abstract validation can be automatically performed using static analysis techniques based on an effect system proposed in this paper. Finally, extensions to additional protocol classes enjoy a soundness theorem provided that these extensions satisfy certain explicit, easily checkable conditions