Side Channel Finder (Version 1.0)∗ Poster Proposal

algorithms which are proven to be secure may become vulnerable after it is implemented in some programming language and run on an actual computer system. Side channel attacks are based on the fact that by observing the implementation’s behavior which is not modeled by the underlying cryp-tographic algorithm the attacker can infer confidential data, e.g., a secret key. Therefore, when developing a cryptographic mechanism it is desirable to check whether its actual implementation opens up side channels. One possibility to launch a side channel attack is to exploit the variance in the running time of a crypto-algorithm implementation. First studies of timing attacks on cryptographic schemes, including Diffie-Hellman and RSA, date back to mid 1990s [5]. Since then, they have been practically demonstrated [4], optimized [8], and evaluated [9]. We present the Side Channel Finder in the version 1.0 (short SCF 1.0), a static analysis tool for detection of potential timing channels in Java implementations of cryp-tographic algorithms. To the best of our knowledge, SCF 1.0 is the first timing channel analysis tool for Java. The Tool The purpose of SCF 1.0 is to support a programmer of a crypto-algorithm implementation in assessing his code for that it is not vulnerable to timing channel attacks. The tool lets the programmer specify which input of an implemented algorithm constitutes a secret that must not be leaked, especially not through timing channels. These specifications are a part of a security policy which assigns security levels high and low to object fields, method parameters, and return values. A policy is stored in an automatically generated XML-document accompanying the source code