Representatives of the Vrije University of Amsterdam, a UNICORE member, Cristiano Guiffrida, along with Pietro Borrello, Daniele Cono d’Elia and Leonardo Querzoni, presented “Constantine: Automatic Side-Channel Resistance Using Efficient Control and Data Flow Linearization”, on November 16th at the ACM CSS 2021 .
This conference is the flagship annual conference of the Special Interest Group on Security, Audit and Control (SIGSAC) of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). The conference brings together information security researchers, practitioners, developers, and users from all over the world to explore cutting-edge ideas and results.
As it is explained in the abstract, the presentation talked about Constantine “a compiler-based system to automatically harden programs against microarchitectural side channels”. Constantine pursues a radical design point where secret-dependent control and data flows are linearized. This strategy provides strong security and compatibility guarantees by construction, but its natural implementation leads to state explosion in real-world programs. In the presentation, they explained how Constantine adresses this challenge.
Slides and the presentation are available.