Common protection mechanisms fail to provide end-to-end security; programs with legitimate access to secret information are not prevented from leaking this to the world. Information-flow aware analyses track the flow of information through the program to prevent such leakages, but often ignore information flows through covert channels even though they pose a serious threat. A typical covert channel is to use the timing of certain events to carry information. We present a timing-aware information-flow type system for a low-level language similar to a non-trivial subset of a sequential Java bytecode. The type system is parameterized over the time model of the instructions of the language and over the algorithm enforcing lowobservational equivalence, used in the prevention of implicit and timing flows.
Hedin and Sands REF present a type-system for preventing external timing attacks for bytecode.
Timing Aware Information Flow Security for a JavaCard-like Bytecode
In Proceedings of BYTECODE, ETAPS’05
Computer Science