POPL 2026
Sun 11 - Sat 17 January 2026 Rennes, France
Sun 11 Jan 2026 15:12 - 15:30 at Salle 19 - Timing Side Channels Chair(s): Cătălin Hriţcu

Coding standards for secure programming recommend “scrubbing” sensitive data once it is no longer needed; otherwise, secrets may be recovered, as illustrated in the Heartbleed attack. Despite being an effective software-based countermeasure, zeroization, i.e., overwriting with zeroes, turns out to be challenging and error-prone. Current verification approaches suffer from scalability or precision issues when applied to production software in practice. In this paper, we put forward the GCC Static Analyzer (GSA), which is a symbolic execution engine for error finding. Specifically, we extend the GSA to build GnuZero; our automated tool that detects missing zeroization for all stack/heap variables storing sensitive data, either directly or by derivation. Our experiments confirm GnuZero efficiency and effectiveness in verifying real-world benchmarks. In particular, GnuZero passes all the relevant Juliet’s test programs, namely associated to the MITRE’s CWE-244 and CWE-226. In addition, GnuZero succeeds in identifying new vulnerabilities in open- source cryptographic modules.

Presentation Slides (main.pdf)1018KiB

Sun 11 Jan

Displayed time zone: Brussels, Copenhagen, Madrid, Paris change

14:00 - 15:30
Timing Side ChannelsPriSC at Salle 19
Chair(s): Cătălin Hriţcu MPI-SP
14:00
18m
Talk
Efficient Dependency Resolution in IFC-aware Decentralized Programming
PriSC
Steffan Sølvsten Aarhus University, Aslan Askarov Aarhus University
File Attached
14:18
18m
Talk
Tooling Design and Lessons Learned from Systematic Evaluations of the Preservation of Low-level Security Properties by Compilers with BinSec
PriSC
Yanis Sellami CEA, List, Univ. Grenoble Alpes, Frédéric Recoules CEA, List, Sébastien Bardin CEA LIST, University Paris-Saclay
14:36
18m
Talk
Decompiling for Constant-Time Analysis
PriSC
Sören van der Wall TU Braunschweig, Santiago Arranz Olmos Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy, Gilles Barthe MPI-SP; IMDEA Software Institute, Lionel Blatter Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy, Youcef Bouzid , Zhiyuan Zhang
14:54
18m
Talk
Modular Verification of Probabilistic Constant-Time
PriSC
Xingyu Xie MPI-SP
File Attached
15:12
18m
Talk
GnuZero: A Compiler-Based Zeroization Static Detection Tool for the Masses
PriSC
Pierrick Philippe Univ Rennes, CNRS, IRISA, Mohamed Sabt Univ Rennes, CNRS, IRISA, Pierre-Alain Fouque Univ Rennes, CNRS, IRISA
File Attached