Side-Channel Analysis
Automated Black-Box Detection of
Side-Channel Vulnerabilities in
Web Applications
The frequent and highly dynamic client-server communication that is characteristic of modern web applications leaves them vulnerable to side-channel leaks where an adversary can learn about the state of the application and visitor's choices, even over encrypted connections.
We have developed a black-box tool for detecting side-channel
vulnerabilities by analyzing network traffic over repeated crawls of a
web application. 
Our tool quantifies the severity of side-channel leaks
in a web application, and gives web application developers a measure of
the risk of information leakage against different types of adversaries.
A key innovation of the approach is developing better metrics for measuring the risk associated with a side-channel vulnerability. Our metric, based on the Fisher criterion, provides better insight into how well an attacker could distinguish states in the web application based on collected traces than traditional entropy-based metrics.
Paper
Peter Chapman and David Evans. Automated Black-Box Detection of Side-Channel Vulnerabilities in Web Applications. In 18th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS 2011), Chicago, IL. 17-21 October 2011. [PDF, 12 pages]
Talk
Peter Chapman's talk at 18th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS 2011), 20 October 2011: [PPTX] [PDF].Software
Tutorials:
Analysis
Crawling Sites
People
Peter Chapman (University of Virginia)David Evans (University of Virginia)
