Predictive Black-Box Mitigation of Timing Channels

Aslan Askarov, Andrew C. Myers, and Danfeng Zhang

Cornell University

We investigate techniques for general black-box mitigation of timing channels. The source of events is wrapped by a timing mitigator that delays output events so that they contain only a bounded amount of information. We introduce a general class of timing mitigators that can achieve any given bound on timing channel leakage, with a tradeoff in system performance. We show these mitigators compose well with other mechanisms for information flow control, and demonstrate they are effective against some known timing attacks.

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