A Note On Side-Channels Resulting From Dynamic Compilation

Abstract. Dynamic compilation systems are of fundamental importance to high performance execution of interpreted languages such as Java. These systems analyse the performance of an application at runtime and aggressively re-compile and optimise code which is deemed critical to performance. However, the premise that the code executed is not the same code as written by the programmer raises a number of important security concerns. In this paper we examine the specific problem that dynamic compilation, through transformation of the code, may introduce side-channel vulnerabilities where before there were none.