JIT leaks: Inducing timing side channels through just-in-time compilation

Abstract

Side-channel vulnerabilities in software are caused by an observable imbalance in resource usage across different program paths. We show that just-in-time (JIT) compilation, which is crucial to the runtime performance of modern interpreted languages, can introduce timing side channels in cases where the input distribution to the program is non-uniform. Such timing channels can enable an attacker to infer potentially sensitive information about predicates on the program input.We define three attack models under which such side channels are harnessable and five vulnerability templates to detect susceptible code fragments and predicates. We also propose profiling algorithms to generate the representative statistical information necessary for the attacker to perform accurate inference.We systematically evaluate the strength of these JIT-based side channels on the java.lang.String, java.lang.Math, and java.math.BigInteger classes from the Java standard library, and on the JavaScript built-in objects String, Math, and Array. We carry out our evaluation using two widely adopted, open-source, JIT-enhanced runtime engines for the Java and JavaScript languages: the Oracle HotSpot Java Virtual Machine and the Google V8 JavaScript engine, respectively.Finally, we demonstrate a few examples of JIT-based side channels in the Apache Shiro security framework and the GraphHopper route planning server, and show that they are observable over the public Internet.