Related papers: Page Cache Attacks
Page Frame Cache (PFC) is a purely software cache, present in modern Linux based operating systems (OS), which stores the page frames that are recently being released by the processes running on a particular CPU. In this paper, we show that…
In the recent past, we have witnessed the shift towards attacks on the microarchitectural CPU level. In particular, cache side-channels play a predominant role as they allow an attacker to exfiltrate secret information by exploiting the CPU…
Microarchitectural side channels expose unprotected software to information leakage attacks where a software adversary is able to track runtime behavior of a benign process and steal secrets such as cryptographic keys. As suggested by…
The "eternal war in cache" has reached browsers, with multiple cache-based side-channel attacks and countermeasures being suggested. A common approach for countermeasures is to disable or restrict JavaScript features deemed essential for…
In modern computer systems, user processes are isolated from each other by the operating system and the hardware. Additionally, in a cloud scenario it is crucial that the hypervisor isolates tenants from other tenants that are co-located on…
Over the last two decades, the danger of sharing resources between programs has been repeatedly highlighted. Multiple side-channel attacks, which seek to exploit shared components for leaking information, have been devised, mostly targeting…
Intel SGX is known to be vulnerable to a class of practical attacks exploiting memory access pattern side-channels, notably page-fault attacks and cache timing attacks. A promising hardening scheme is to wrap applications in hardware…
The last level cache is vulnerable to timing based side channel attacks because it is shared by the attacker and the victim processes even if they are located on different cores. These timing attacks evict the victim cache lines using small…
Cache randomization has recently been revived as a promising defense against conflict-based cache side-channel attacks. As two of the latest implementations, CEASER-S and ScatterCache both claim to thwart conflict-based cache side-channel…
Power analysis is a branch of side channel attacks where power consumption data is used as the side channel to attack the system. First using a device like an oscilloscope power traces are collected when the cryptographic device is doing…
Cache occupancy attacks exploit the shared nature of cache hierarchies to infer a victim's activities by monitoring overall cache usage, unlike access-driven cache attacks that focus on specific cache lines or sets. There exists some prior…
Side channel attacks steal secret keys by cleverly leveraging information leakages and can, therefore, break encryption. Thus, detection and mitigation of side channel attacks is a very important problem, but the solutions proposed in the…
Cryptographic research takes software timing side channels seriously. Approaches to mitigate them include constant-time coding and techniques to enforce such practices. However, recent attacks like Meltdown [42], Spectre [37], and…
Side-channel attacks allow extracting secret information from the execution of cryptographic primitives by correlating the partially known computed data and the measured side-channel signal. However, to set up a successful side-channel…
With the rapidly growing interest in quantum computing also grows the importance of securing these quantum computers from various physical attacks. Constantly increasing qubit counts and improvements to the fidelity of the quantum computers…
Time variation during program execution can leak sensitive information. Time variations due to program control flow and hardware resource contention have been used to steal encryption keys in cipher implementations such as AES and RSA. A…
Spin Transfer Torque RAM (STTRAM) is a promising candidate for Last Level Cache (LLC) due to high endurance, high density and low leakage. One of the major disadvantages of STTRAM is high write latency and write current. Additionally, the…
We introduce a new timing side-channel attack on Intel CPU processors. Our Frontal attack exploits timing differences that arise from how the CPU frontend fetches and processes instructions while being interrupted. In particular, we observe…
Traditionally, power side-channel analysis requires physical access to the target device, as well as specialized devices to measure the power consumption with enough precision. Recently research has shown that on x86 platforms, on-chip…
Covert channels can be utilized to secretly deliver information from high privileged processes to low privileged processes in the context of a high-assurance computing system. In this case study, we investigate the possibility of covert…