Abstract
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 counters for detection.
In this article, we show that this assumption does not hold by developing a novel attack technique: the Flush+Flush attack. The Flush+Flush attack only relies on the execution time of the flush instruction, which depends on whether data is cached or not. Flush+Flush does not make any memory accesses, contrary to any other cache attack. Thus, it causes no cache misses at all and the number of cache hits is reduced to a minimum due to the constant cache flushes. Therefore, Flush+Flush attacks are stealthy, i.e., the spy process cannot be detected based on cache hits and misses, or state-of-the-art detection mechanisms. The Flush+Flush attack runs in a higher frequency and thus is faster than any existing cache attack. With 496 KB/s in a cross-core covert channel it is 6.7 times faster than any previously published cache covert channel.
C. Maurice—Part of the work was done while author was affiliated to Technicolor and Eurecom.
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Notes
- 1.
After public disclosure of the Flush+Flush attack on November 14, 2015, Flush+Flush has also been demonstrated on ARM-based mobile devices [22].
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Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Mathias Payer, Anders Fogh, and our anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions.
Supported by the EU Horizon 2020 programme under GA No. 644052 (HECTOR), the EU FP7 programme under GA No. 610436 (MATTHEW), the Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG) and Styrian Business Promotion Agency (SFG) under GA No. 836628 (SeCoS), and Cryptacus COST Action IC1403.
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Gruss, D., Maurice, C., Wagner, K., Mangard, S. (2016). Flush+Flush: A Fast and Stealthy Cache Attack. In: Caballero, J., Zurutuza, U., Rodríguez, R. (eds) Detection of Intrusions and Malware, and Vulnerability Assessment. DIMVA 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9721. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40667-1_14
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