SCASE: Automated Secret Recovery via Side-Channel-Assisted Symbolic Execution

Abstract

In recent years, there has been an explosion of research on software-based side-channel attacks, which commonly require an in-depth understanding of the victim application to extract sensitive information. With evermore leakage sources and targets, an important remaining challenge is how to automatically reconstruct secrets from side-channel traces. This paper proposes SCASE, a novel methodology for inferring secrets from an opaque victim binary using symbolic execution, guided by a concrete side-channel trace. Our key innovation is in utilizing the memory accesses observed in the side-channel trace to effectively prune the symbolic-execution space, thus avoiding state explosion. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, we introduce Athena, a proof-of-concept framework to automatically recover secrets from Intel SGX enclaves via controlled channels. We show that Athena can automatically recover the 2048-bit secret key of an enclave running RSA within 4 minutes and the 256-bit key from an RC4 KSA implementation within 5 minutes. Furthermore, we demonstrate key recovery of OpenSSL’s 256-bit AES S-Box implementation and recover the inputs to OpenSSL’s binary extended Euclidean algorithm. To demonstrate the versatility of our approach beyond cryptographic applications, we further recover the input to a poker-hand evaluator. In conclusion, our findings indicate that constraining symbolic execution via side-channel traces is an effective way to automate software-based side-channel attacks without requiring an in-depth understanding of the victim application.