Automated Side-Channel Analysis of Cryptographic Protocol Implementations

Formal verification of cryptographic protocols typically relies on symbolic models that abstract away compiled code and microarchitectural side channels, leaving a gap between verified specifications and deployed executables. We present a toolchain that extracts protocol-relevant models from real binaries and analyzes them under explicit leakage contracts for constant-time and Spectre-PHT-style speculative observations. Starting from a selected binary region, we lift machine code to an intermediate representation, instrument it with leakage contracts, symbolically execute it to obtain event/observation traces, and translate these traces into Sapic + for analysis with Tamarin, ProVerif, and DeepSec. As case studies, we extract models of WhatsApp Desktop's session-management and double-ratchet components from its binary and analyze forward secrecy and post-compromise security under a state-cloning compromise. For side-channel analysis, we study the Basic Access Control (BAC) protocol used in e-passports and WhatsApp's session establishment. Under our observation models, we identify an instruction-cache side channel in WhatsApp Desktop enabling social-graph inference, and we reproduce known unlinkability issues in BAC under microarchitectural observations. CCS Concepts • Security and privacy → Formal methods and theory of security.