Many of the most significant attacks against modern-day cryptosystems are actually side-channel attacks like timing attacks or power analysis. In this talk, I will go over a new and extremely powerful technique for mitigating these attacks, specifically encoding information about the operations performed in the type of the function, and then taking advantage of the Curry-Howard isomorphism, which unifies types and propositions, to prove our algorithms will always perform the same number of operations, regardless of their inputs. This allows the program itself to serve as a proof of its resistance to attacks based on timing, power consumption, or other side channels.

JP Smith is a student at the University of Illinois, where he serves on the board of SigPWNY, UIUC’s security club. His interests include cryptography, functional programming, and machine learning, and in his free time, he enjoys camping, hiking, and cycling. He has previously spoken at THOTCON in 2015, and you can find him on the internet as japesinator on github and twitter.

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