Comparison of Transaction Mechanisms for Java in the Context of Side-Channel Mitigation

Side channels are unintended indirect flows of infor-mation revealed by physical executions of a computer program. Examples of side channels include program’s running time, cache behaviour, power consumption, etc. An attacker who observes such unintended flows may reconstruct secrets e.g., private cryptographic keys, and this makes side channels a severe security vulnerability. Among different types of side channels, timing side-channels are particularly dangerous since they can be exploited remotely over computer net-works, and this has been demonstrated by breaking for instance SSL and TLS protocols. Transactional branching [BRW06] is one of the tech-niques for removing timing side channels from the soft-ware. It allows one to automatically transform a vul