We present a novel approach to proving the absence of timing channels. The idea is to partition the program's execution traces in such a way that each partition component is checked for timing attack resilience by a time complexity analysis and that per-component resilience implies the resilience of the whole program. We construct a partition by splitting the program traces at secret-independent branches. This ensures that any pair of traces with the same public input has a component containing both traces. Crucially, the per-component checks can be normal safety properties expressed in terms of a single execution. Our approach is thus in contrast to prior approaches, such as self-composition, that aim to reason about multiple (k ≥ 2) executions at once.We formalize the above as an approach called quotient partitioning, generalized to any k-safety property, and prove it to be sound. A key feature of our approach is a demanddriven partitioning strategy that uses a regex-like notion called trails to identify sets of execution traces, particularly those influenced by tainted (or secret) data. We have applied our technique in a prototype implementation tool called Blazer, based on WALA, PPL, and the brics automaton library. We have proved timing-channel freedom of (or synthesized an attack specification for) 24 programs written in Java bytecode, including 6 classic examples from the literature and 6 examples extracted from the DARPA STAC challenge problems.CCS Concepts • Security and privacy → Logic and verification; • Theory of computation → Program reasoning; Logic and verification; • Software and its engineering → Formal methods

We establish foundational results on the computational complexity of deciding entailment in Separation Logic with general inductive predicates whose underlying base language allows for pure formulas, pointers and existentially quantified variables. We show that entailment is in general undecidable, and ExpTime-hard in a fragment recently shown to be decidable by Iosif et al. Moreover, entailment in the base language is Π P 2 -complete, the upper bound even holds in the presence of list predicates. We additionally show that entailment in essentially any fragment of Separation Logic allowing for general inductive predicates is intractable even when strong syntactic restrictions are imposed. * Supported by the French ANR, ReacHard (grant ANR-11-BS02-001).

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Given a graph, a relation on its nodes, and a query language Q of interest, we study the Q-definability problem which amounts to deciding whether there exists a query in Q defining precisely the given relation over the given graph. Previous research has identified the complexity of FO-and CQ-definability. In this paper, we consider the definability problem for regular paths and conjunctive regular path queries (CRPQs) over labelled graphs.

We present a novel approach to proving the absence of timing channels. The idea is to partition the program's execution traces in such a way that each partition component is checked for timing attack resilience by a time complexity analysis and that per-component resilience implies the resilience of the whole program. We construct a partition by splitting the program traces at secret-independent branches. This ensures that any pair of traces with the same public input has a component containing both traces. Crucially, the per-component checks can be normal safety properties expressed in terms of a single execution. Our approach is thus in contrast to prior approaches, such as self-composition, that aim to reason about multiple (k ≥ 2) executions at once. We formalize the above as an approach called quotient partitioning, generalized to any k-safety property, and prove it to be sound. A key feature of our approach is a demanddriven partitioning strategy that uses a regex-like notion called trails to identify sets of execution traces, particularly those influenced by tainted (or secret) data. We have applied our technique in a prototype implementation tool called Blazer, based on WALA, PPL, and the brics automaton library. We have proved timing-channel freedom of (or synthesized an attack specification for) 24 programs written in Java bytecode, including 6 classic examples from the literature and 6 examples extracted from the DARPA STAC challenge problems. CCS Concepts • Security and privacy → Logic and verification; • Theory of computation → Program reasoning; Logic and verification; • Software and its engineering → Formal methods