University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Transforming leaky COTS binaries into data-oblivious binaries

El Hajj, Mohamad Hadi

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/109366

Description

Title
Transforming leaky COTS binaries into data-oblivious binaries
Author(s)
El Hajj, Mohamad Hadi
Issue Date
2020-11-19
Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)
Fletcher, Christopher W
Department of Study
Electrical & Computer Eng
Discipline
Electrical & Computer Engr
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
M.S.
Degree Level
Thesis
Keyword(s)
  • security
  • binary
  • cots
  • side-channel
  • hardware
  • bincloak
  • data-oblivious
  • defence
  • mitigation
  • x86
  • microarchitecture
Abstract
"The rise in microarchitecture side-channel attacks has significantly impacted the realm of hardware security today, and has left sensitive applications vulnerable to a wide set of attack vectors. It is crucial to develop effective and comprehensive mitigation strategies to protect vulnerable applications against these attack vectors. Recently, there has been a surge of efforts to defend against such attacks through data-oblivious programming, but no work exists today to transform ""unsafe"" COTS binaries into data-oblivious binaries. Achieving data-oblivious COTS binaries is challenging due to their complex nature and lack of clean abstractions. However, such a feat is necessary because many COTS binaries are already deployed in production and run on outdated vulnerable microarchitectures. This paper builds BinCloak, the first framework that can automatically transform x86 COTS binaries into side-channel resistant data-oblivious binaries. We do this by defining a data-oblivious program representation for program binaries, and implementing techniques to construct this representation and transform it into a data-oblivious binary. Finally, we show BinCloak can transform a wide range of applications, and is the first to transform large complex binaries of real-world cryptography applications such as Libgcrypt's RSA implementation."
Graduation Semester
2020-12
Type of Resource
Thesis
Permalink
http://hdl.handle.net/2142/109366
Copyright and License Information
Copyright 2020 Mohamad El Hajj

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