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Creators/Authors contains: "Herbick, James"

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  1. Side-channel attacks leverage implementation of algorithms to bypass security and leak restricted data. A timing attack observes differences in runtime in response to varying inputs to learn restricted information. Most prior work has focused on applying timing attacks to cryptoanalysis algorithms; other approaches sought to learn about database content by measuring the time of an operation (e.g., index update or query caching). Our goal is to evaluate the practical risks of leveraging a non-privileged user account to learn about data hidden from the user account by access control. As with other side-channel attacks, this attack exploits the inherent nature of how queries are executed in a database system. Internally, the database engine processes the entire database table, even if the user only has access to some of the rows. We present a preliminary investigation of what a regular user can learn about “hidden” data by observing the execution time of their queries over an indexed column in a table. We perform our experiments in a cache-control environment (i.e., clearing database cache between runs) to measure an upper bound for data leakage and privacy risks. Our experiments show that, in a real system, it is difficult to reliably learn about restricted data due to natural operating system (OS) runtime fluctuations and OS-level caching. However, when the access control mechanism itself is relatively costly, a user can not only learn about hidden data but they may closely approximate the number of rows hidden by the access control mechanism. 
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