Discriminating Traces with Time.


Saeid Tizpaz-Niari, Pavol Cerny, Bor-Yuh Evan Chang, Sriram Sankaranarayanan and Ashutosh Trivedi

What properties about the internals of a program explain the possible differences in its overall running time for different inputs? In this paper, we propose a formal framework for considering this question we dub trace-set discrimination. We show that even though the algorithmic problem of computing maximum likelihood discriminants is NP-hard, approaches based on integer linear programming (ILP) and decision tree learning can be useful in zeroing-in on the program internals. On a set of Java benchmarks, we find that compactly—represented decision trees scalably discriminate with high accuracy—more scalably than maximum likelihood discriminants and with comparable accuracy. We demonstrate on three larger case studies how decision-tree discriminants produced by our tool are useful for debugging timing side-channel vulnerabilities (i.e., where a malicious observer infers secrets simply from passively watching execution times) and availability vulnerabilities.

In: Legay A., Margaria T. (eds) Tools and Algorithms for the Construction and Analysis of Systems. TACAS 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 10206. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
PDF © 2017.