Related papers: Prime+Retouch: When Cache is Locked and Leaked
Caches have become the prime method for unintended information extraction across logical isolation boundaries. Even Spectre and Meltdown rely on the cache side channel, as it provides great resolution and is widely available on all major…
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…
Modern x86 processors have many prefetch instructions that can be used by programmers to boost performance. However, these instructions may also cause security problems. In particular, we found that on Intel processors, there are two…
Caches are used to reduce the speed differential between the CPU and memory to improve the performance of modern processors. However, attackers can use contention-based cache timing attacks to steal sensitive information from victim…
Recent work has shown that out-of-order and speculative execution mechanisms used to increase performance in the majority of processors expose the processors to critical attacks. These attacks, called Meltdown and Spectre, exploit the side…
Research on cache attacks has shown that CPU caches leak significant information. Proposed detection mechanisms assume that all cache attacks cause more cache hits and cache misses than benign applications and use hardware performance…
Modern computer processors use microarchitectural optimization mechanisms to improve performance. As a downside, such optimizations are prone to introducing side-channel vulnerabilities. Speculative loading of memory, called prefetching, is…
Cache side channel attacks are increasingly alarming in modern processors due to the recent emergence of Spectre and Meltdown attacks. A typical attack performs intentional cache access and manipulates cache states to leak secrets by…
Side-channel attacks on shared hardware resources increasingly threaten confidentiality, especially with the rise of Large Language Models (LLMs). In this work, we introduce Spill The Beans, a novel application of cache side-channels to…
Side-channel attacks have become prominent attack surfaces in cyberspace. Attackers use the side information generated by the system while performing a task. Among the various side-channel attacks, cache side-channel attacks are leading as…
Recent transient-execution attacks, such as RIDL, Fallout, and ZombieLoad, demonstrated that attackers can leak information while it transits through microarchitectural buffers. Named Microarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS) by Intel, these…
In the last 10 years, cache attacks on Intel x86 CPUs have gained increasing attention among the scientific community and powerful techniques to exploit cache side channels have been developed. However, modern smartphones use one or more…
Timing and cache side channels provide powerful attacks against many sensitive operations including cryptographic implementations. Existing defenses cannot protect against all classes of such attacks without incurring prohibitive…
The recent Meltdown and Spectre attacks highlight the importance of automated verification techniques for identifying hardware security vulnerabilities. We have developed a tool for synthesizing microarchitecture-specific programs capable…
Microarchitectural side channel attacks have been very prominent in security research over the last few years. Caches have been an outstanding covert channel, as they provide high resolution and generic cross-core leakage even with simple…
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…
The complexity of modern processor architectures has given rise to sophisticated interactions among their components. Such interactions may result in potential attack vectors in terms of side channels, possibly available to user-land…
Modern multi-core processors share cache resources for maximum cache utilization and performance gains. However, this leaves the cache vulnerable to side-channel attacks, where timing differences in shared cache behavior are exploited to…
This work presents a new tool to verify the correctness of cryptographic implementations with respect to cache attacks. Our methodology discovers vulnerabilities that are hard to find with other techniques, observed as exploitable leakage.…
We present a new hardware-agnostic side-channel attack that targets one of the most fundamental software caches in modern computer systems: the operating system page cache. The page cache is a pure software cache that contains all…