Efficient Detection and Quantification of Timing Leaks with Neural Networks

Detection and quantification of information leaks through timing side channels are important to guarantee confidentiality. Although static analysis remains the prevalent approach for detecting timing side channels, it is computationally challenging for real-world applications. In addition, the detection techniques are usually restricted to “yes” or “no” answers. In practice, real-world applications may need to leak information about the secret. Therefore, quantification techniques are necessary to evaluate the resulting threats of information leaks. Since both problems are very difficult or impossible for static analysis techniques, we propose a dynamic analysis method. Our novel approach is to split the problem into two tasks. First, we learn a timing model of the program as a neural network. Second, we analyze the neural network to quantify information leaks. As demonstrated in our experiments, both of these tasks are feasible in practice—making the approach a significant improvement over the state-of-the-art side channel detectors and quantifiers. Our key technical contributions are (a) a neural network architecture that enables side channel discovery and (b) an MILP-based algorithm to estimate the side-channel strength. On a set of micro-benchmarks and real-world applications, we show that neural network models learn timing behaviors of programs with thousands of methods. We also show that neural networks with thousands of neurons can be efficiently analyzed to detect and quantify information leaks through timing side channels.