{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/microwalk-a-framework-for-finding-side","title":"MicroWalk: A Framework for Finding Side Channels in Binaries","arxiv_id":"1808.05575","date":"2018-08-16","proceeding":null,"authors":["Jan Wichelmann","Ahmad Moghimi","Thomas Eisenbarth","Berk Sunar"],"abstract":"Microarchitectural side channels expose unprotected software to information leakage attacks where a software adversary is able to track runtime behavior of a benign process and steal secrets such as cryptographic keys. As suggested by incremental software patches for the RSA algorithm against variants of side-channel attacks within different versions of cryptographic libraries, protecting security-critical algorithms against side channels is an intricate task. Software protections avoid leakages by operating in constant time with a uniform resource usage pattern independent of the processed secret. In this respect, automated testing and verification of software binaries for leakage-free behavior is of importance, particularly when the source code is not available. In this work, we propose a novel technique based on Dynamic Binary Instrumentation and Mutual Information Analysis to efficiently locate and quantify memory based and control-flow based microarchitectural leakages. We develop a software framework named \\tool~for side-channel analysis of binaries which can be extended to support new classes of leakage. For the first time, by utilizing \\tool, we perform rigorous leakage analysis of two widely-used closed-source cryptographic libraries: \\emph{Intel IPP} and \\emph{Microsoft CNG}. We analyze $15$ different cryptographic implementations consisting of $112$ million instructions in about $105$ minutes of CPU time. By locating previously unknown leakages in hardened implementations, our results suggest that \\tool~can efficiently find microarchitectural leakages in software binaries.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/1808.05575v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/1808.05575v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"microwalk-a-framework-for-finding-side","repo_url":"https://github.com/uzl-its/microwalk","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null},{"paper_slug":"microwalk-a-framework-for-finding-side","repo_url":"https://github.com/microwalk-project/microwalk","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}