Let's DOIT: Using Intel's Extended HW/SW Contract for Secure Compilation of Crypto Code [CRoCS wiki]

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<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" aria-hidden="true" focusable="false" width="1em" height="1em" preserveAspectRatio="xMidYMid meet" viewBox="0 0 24 24" class="iconify mr-1" data-icon="mdi:arrow-left" style="vertical-align: -0.125em; transform: rotate(360deg);"><path d="M20 11v2H8l5.5 5.5l-1.42 1.42L4.16 12l7.92-7.92L13.5 5.5L8 11h12z" fill="currentColor"></path></svg>====== Let's DOIT: Using Intel's Extended HW/SW Contract for Secure Compilation of Crypto Code  ======
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\_{{fa>user}}\_\_//Authors:// Santiago Arranz-Olmos, Gilles Barthe, Benjamin Grégoire, [[:publications:authors:jan-jancar|Jan Jancar]], Vincent Laporte, Tiago Oliveira, Peter Schwabe

{{fa>user-circle-o}}\_//Primary contact:// Jan Jancar %%<%%<j08ny@mail.muni.cz>%%>%%

{{fa>bullhorn}}\_//Conference:// [[https://ches.iacr.org/2025/|CHES 2025]]

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  @InProceedings{2025-ches-jancar,
    Title         = {Let's DOIT: Using Intel's Extended HW/SW Contract for Secure Compilation of Crypto Code},
    Author        = {Santiago Arranz-Olmos and Gilles Barthe and Benjamin Grégoire and Jan Jancar and Vincent Laporte and Tiago Oliveira and Peter Schwabe},
    BookTitle     = {IACR Transactions on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems},
    Publisher     = {Ruhr-University of Bochum},
    Year          = {2025},
    Keywords      = {constant-time, cryptoimplementations, Jasmin},
  }

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<panel type="default" title="Abstract">
It is a widely accepted standard practice to implement cryptographic software so that secret inputs do not influence the cycle count. Software following this paradigm is often referred to as "constant-time" software and typically involves following three rules: 1) never branch on a secret-dependent condition, 2) never access memory at a secret-dependent location, and 3) avoid variable-time arithmetic operations on secret data. The third rule requires knowledge about such variable-time arithmetic instructions, or vice versa, which operations are safe to use on secret inputs. For a long time, this knowledge was based on either documentation or microbenchmarks, but critically, there were never any guarantees for future microarchitectures. This changed with the introduction of the data-operand-independent-timing (DOIT) mode on Intel CPUs and, to some extent, the data-independent-timing (DIT) mode on Arm CPUs. Both Intel and Arm document a subset of their respective instruction sets that are intended to leak no information about their inputs through timing, even on future microarchitectures if the CPU is set to run in a dedicated DOIT (or DIT) mode.

In this paper, we present a principled solution that leverages DOIT to enable cryptographic software that is future-proof constant-time, in the sense that it ensures that only instructions from the DOIT subset are used to operate on secret data, even during speculative execution after a mispredicted branch or function return location. For this solution, we build on top of existing security type systems in the Jasmin framework for high-assurance cryptography.

We then use our solution to evaluate the extent to which existing cryptographic software built to be "constant-time" is already secure in this stricter paradigm implied by DOIT and what the performance impact is to move from constant-time to future-proof constant-time.
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