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Constant-time code has become the de-facto standard for secure cryptographic implementations. However, some memory-based leakage classes such as ciphertext side-channels, silent stores, and data memory-dependent prefetching remain unaddressed. In the context of ciphertext side-channel mitigations, the practicality of interleaving data with counter values remains to be explored. To close this gap, we define design choices and requirements to leverage interleaving for a generic ciphertext side-channel mitigation. Based on these results, we implement Zebrafix, a compiler-based tool to ensure freshness of memory stores. We evaluate Zebrafix and find that interleaving can perform much better than other ciphertext side-channel mitigations, at the cost of a high practical complexity. We further observe that ciphertext side-channels, silent stores and data memory-dependent prefetching belong to a broader attack category: memory-centric side-channels. Under this unified view, we discuss to what extent ciphertext side-channel mitigations can be adapted to prevent all three memory-centric side-channel attacks via interleaving.

For the first time the neutron-rich hydrogen isotope $\rm ^{6}H$ was produced in an electron scattering experiment in the reaction $\rm ^{7}Li(e,~e'p\pi^{+})^{6}H$ using the spectrometer facility of the A1 Collaboration at the Mainz Microtron accelerator. By measuring the triple coincidence between the scattered electron, the produced proton, and $\pi^{+}$, the missing mass spectrum of $\rm ^{6}H$ was obtained. A clear peak above $^3$H+n+n+n energy threshold was seen resulting in a ground state energy of $\rm ^{6}H$ at $2.3\pm0.5({\rm stat.})\pm0.4({\rm syst.})$ MeV with a width of $1.9\pm1.0({\rm stat.})\pm0.4({\rm syst.})$ MeV. This work challenges the understandings of multi-nucleon interactions and presents a new method to study light neutron-rich nuclei with electron scattering experiments., Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures

The ratio of the transverse and longitudinal component of polarization transfer to protons in the quasi-elastic $(\vec{e}, e^{\prime} \vec{p}\,)$ reaction, $P^{\prime}_x/P^{\prime}_z$, is sensitive to the proton's electromagnetic form factor ratio, $G_E/G_M$. To explore density-dependent in-medium modifications, a comparison of polarization transfer ratios involving protons from distinct nuclear shells, each with different local nuclear densities, has been proposed. In this study, we present such comparisons between four shells, $1s_{1/2}$, $1p_{3/2}$ in $^{12}\mathrm{C}$ and $1d_{3/2}$, $2s_{1/2}$ in $^{40}\mathrm{Ca}$. In an effort to account for other many-body effects that may differ between shells, we use a state-of-the-art relativistic distorted-wave impulse-approximation (RDWIA) calculation and present the double ratios, $(P^{\prime}_x/P^{\prime}_z)_{\rm Data}/(P^{\prime}_x/P^{\prime}_z)_{\rm RDWIA}$ as well as the super ratios, $\left[(P^{\prime}_x/P^{\prime}_z)_{\rm A}/(P^{\prime}_x/P^{\prime}_z)_{\rm B}\right]_{\rm Data}/\left[(P^{\prime}_x/P^{\prime}_z)_{\rm A}/(P^{\prime}_x/P^{\prime}_z)_{\rm B}\right]_{\rm RDWIA}$, for chosen shells A and B, as a function of effective local nuclear densities. We find that double ratios for individual shells show a dependence on the probed effective nuclear densities. Studying the ratios, we observed a systematic variation between pairs of higher- and lower-density shells.

Polarization transfer to a bound proton in polarized electron knock-out reactions, $\mathrm{A}(\vec{e},e^{\prime}\vec{p})$, is a powerful tool to look for in-medium modification of the bound proton. It requires comparison to calculations which consider the many-body effects accompanying the quasi-free process. We report here measured components $P_x^{\prime}$, $P_z^{\prime}$, and their ratio $P_x^{\prime}/P_z^{\prime}$, of polarization transfer to protons bound in $^{40}\mathrm{Ca}$, which is described well by the shell model and for which reliable calculations are available. While the calculations capture the essence of the data, our statistical precision allows us to observe deviations which cannot be explained by simple scaling, including by varying the proton electromagnetic form factor ratio $G_E/G_M$. We further explore the deviations of the ratio of the polarization transfer components from that of a free proton, $(P_x^{\prime}/P_z^{\prime})_{\rm A}/(P_x^{\prime}/P_z^{\prime})_{\rm H}$, and its dependence on the bound-proton virtuality.

RISC-V is an emerging technology, with applications ranging from embedded devices to high-performance servers. Therefore, more and more security-critical workloads will be conducted with code that is compiled for RISC-V. Well-known microarchitectural side-channel attacks against established platforms like x86 apply to RISC-V CPUs as well. As RISC-V does not mandate any hardware-based side-channel countermeasures, a piece of code compiled for a generic RISC-V CPU in a cloud server cannot make safe assumptions about the microarchitecture on which it is running. Existing tools for aiding software-level precautions by checking side-channel vulnerabilities on source code or x86 binaries are not compatible with RISC-V machine code. In this work, we study the requirements and goals of architecture-specific leakage analysis for RISC-V and illustrate how to achieve these goals with the help of fast and precise dynamic binary analysis. We implement all necessary building blocks for finding side-channel leakages on RISC-V, while relying on existing mature solutions when possible. Our leakage analysis builds upon the modular side-channel analysis framework Microwalk, that examines execution traces for leakage through secret-dependent memory accesses or branches. To provide suitable traces, we port the ARM dynamic binary instrumentation tool MAMBO to RISC-V. Our port named MAMBO-V can instrument arbitrary binaries which use the 64-bit general purpose instruction set. We evaluate our toolchain on several cryptographic libraries with RISC-V support and identify multiple exploitable leakages., Comment: 20 pages

Trusted execution environments (TEEs) provide an environment for running workloads in the cloud without having to trust cloud service providers, by offering additional hardware-assisted security guarantees. However, main memory encryption as a key mechanism to protect against system-level attackers trying to read the TEE's content and physical, off-chip attackers, is insufficient. The recent Cipherleaks attacks infer secret data from TEE-protected implementations by analyzing ciphertext patterns exhibited due to deterministic memory encryption. The underlying vulnerability, dubbed the ciphertext side-channel, is neither protected by state-of-the-art countermeasures like constant-time code nor by hardware fixes. Thus, in this paper, we present a software-based, drop-in solution that can harden existing binaries such that they can be safely executed under TEEs vulnerable to ciphertext side-channels, without requiring recompilation. We combine taint tracking with both static and dynamic binary instrumentation to find sensitive memory locations, and mitigate the leakage by masking secret data before it gets written to memory. This way, although the memory encryption remains deterministic, we destroy any secret-dependent patterns in encrypted memory. We show that our proof-of-concept implementation protects various constant-time implementations against ciphertext side-channels with reasonable overhead., Comment: Jan Wichelmann and Anna P\"atschke contributed equally to this work

Secret-dependent timing behavior in cryptographic implementations has resulted in exploitable vulnerabilities, undermining their security. Over the years, numerous tools to automatically detect timing leakage or even to prove their absence have been proposed. However, a recent study at IEEE S&P 2022 showed that, while many developers are aware of one or more analysis tools, they have major difficulties integrating these into their workflow, as existing tools are tedious to use and mapping discovered leakages to their originating code segments requires expert knowledge. In addition, existing tools focus on compiled languages like C, or analyze binaries, while the industry and open-source community moved to interpreted languages, most notably JavaScript. In this work, we introduce Microwalk-CI, a novel side-channel analysis framework for easy integration into a JavaScript development workflow. First, we extend existing dynamic approaches with a new analysis algorithm, that allows efficient localization and quantification of leakages, making it suitable for use in practical development. We then present a technique for generating execution traces from JavaScript applications, which can be further analyzed with our and other algorithms originally designed for binary analysis. Finally, we discuss how Microwalk-CI can be integrated into a continuous integration (CI) pipeline for efficient and ongoing monitoring. We evaluate our analysis framework by conducting a thorough evaluation of several popular JavaScript cryptographic libraries, and uncover a number of critical leakages.