HASTE: Software Security Analysis for Timing Attacks on Clear Hardware Assumption

Abstract

Information leakage via timing side-channel analysis can compromise embedded systems used in diverse applications that are otherwise secure. Most state-of-the-art timing side-channel detection techniques focus on analyzing the software code while paying little to no attention to the underlying hardware. This limits the ability of such techniques in terms of detection and repair. In this letter, we propose a timing side-channel analysis framework that takes into consideration both the software and the underlying hardware microarchitecture to detect vulnerabilities with high precision. We also propose a set of metrics to quantify the severity of the vulnerabilities. We verify our proposed framework on two different computation subroutines which are widely used in crypto and secure systems.