TWC: TTP Option: Small: Differential Introspective Side Channels --- Discovery, Analysis, and Defense

众所周知，安全领域的侧信道很难被系统地发现和消除。然而，它们可能导致各种隐秘的攻击，严重损害网络安全。这项工作的重点是一类重要的侧信道，它们是网络系统运行的基础。这项工作不是不断地对新发现的侧通道做出反应，因为有临时补丁的安全漏洞，而是能够自动发现一类重要的侧通道，这些侧通道的存在是由于暴露信息以启用计算系统的调试和管理的固有目标。该项目预计将为侧通道调查的安全领域带来范式转变，可以为防止各种网络攻击带来显着的经济效益。该项目对本科生和研究生的教育和劳动力培训也有重要的好处，除了通过适用的标准流程更广泛地传播研究结果，以确保业务采用。本研究调查了针对网络系统（如网络堆栈）的一类全新的侧信道攻击，这些攻击可能会对用户隐私、网络安全和应用程序完整性造成重大损害。关于这类攻击的一个示例特征是，需要主动注入精心设计的和可能不正确的事件来触发程序中的错误条件，从而揭示它们的内部敏感状态，这可能间接暴露关键信息。有趣的是，这些攻击是网络和操作系统设计和实现的固有副产品，从根本上很难修改。与其他众所周知的可以通过被动监测直接观察到的侧信道（例如功率和时序）相比，这类侧信道的发现要微妙得多，防御起来也更具挑战性。拟议的安全工作有助于引入一种更严格的方法来发现一类新的侧信道，这些侧信道对小型系统（如移动设备）和大型网络系统（如企业网络）的安全保证都有直接影响。本研究通过利用程序分析和网络测量科学，开发了系统地、严格地检测和消除这些侧信道的方法。通过调查了解网络系统的安全保证和可管理性之间的权衡，可以在实践中部署更实用和可用的安全解决方案。

Side channels in the security domain are known to be challenging to discover and eliminate systematically. Nevertheless, they can lead to a variety of stealthy attacks seriously compromising cybersecurity. This work focuses on an important class of side channels that are fundamental to the operations of networked systems. Rather than constantly reacting to newly discovered side channels because of security breaches with ad-hoc patches, this work enables the automated discovery of an important class of side channels that exist due to the inherent goal of exposing information to enable debugging and management of computing systems. This project is expected to bring a paradigm shift to the security area of side channel investigation that can bring significant economic benefits of preventing a diverse set of cyberattacks. This project also has important educational and workforce training benefits for both undergraduate and graduate students, in addition to the broader dissemination of the findings through applicable standards processes to ensure operational adoption.This research investigates an entirely new class of side channel attacks against networked systems such as network stacks that can lead to significant damage to user privacy, network security, and application integrity. An example feature about this class of attacks is the requirement of actively injecting carefully crafted and potentially incorrect events to trigger error conditions in a program so as to reveal their internal sensitive states, which can indirectly expose critical information. Interestingly, the attacks are inherent byproducts of network and operating system design and implementation, which are fundamentally hard to modify. In contrast to other well-known side channels that can be directly observed through passive monitoring, e.g., power and timing, this class of side channels is much more subtle to discover and also more challenging to defend against. The proposed security work helps introduce a more rigorous approach to discovering a new class of side channels, that have direct impact on the security assurance of both small systems such as mobile devices as well as large network systems such as enterprise networks. This research develops methods to systematically and rigorously detect and eliminate such side channels by leveraging both program analysis and network measurement science. The investigation to understand the tradeoffs between security guarantee and manageability of network systems leads to more practical and usable security solutions that can be deployed in practice.