[Haskell-cafe] ANNOUNCE: secure-sockets version 1.0

[Thomas DuBuisson]

>> You could have gone to Hackage and checked your protocols correctness
>> using CPSA, not that the side-channel attacks would be discovered by
>> such a tool.
>
> Interesting. I had seen CPSA announced at one point, but there appears to be
> no documentation whatsoever. Did I miss the doc links?

There's lots of documentation:

$ cabal unpack cpsa
$ cd cpsa*
$ cd doc
$ ls *.pdf -- or you might have to build from .tex, I can't recall.

> The two large families of side-channel attacks that I know of and that have
> been popular (== successful) recently are:
> ... timing and cache miss attacks ...
> Am I making sense?

So much sense it's painful.  (that's a 'yes')

> Another of my tentative projects was to write a C library that implements
> popular crypto building blocks, with a large battery of tests for
> correctness and resistance to timing attacks.

But how does that prevent a timing-based information flow if the
consuming Haskell application is the one performing the branch?  Are
you assuming all information flow in the Haskell program is so
high-level its not cryptographically important, thus protecting these
low-level primitives is sufficient?  Also, if you feel any of these
tests would fit into the Test.Crypto module (or a submodule) then
please feel free to send in a patch or start some discussion.

Cheers,
Thomas