Don't Mesh Around: Side-Channel Attacks and Mitigations on Mesh Interconnects

This paper studies microarchitectural side-channel attacks and mitigations on the on-chip mesh interconnect used in modern, server-class Intel processors. We find that, though difficult to exploit, the mesh interconnect can be abused by an adversary even when known attack vectors inside the cores and caches are closed. We then present novel, non-invasive mitigation mechanisms to interconnect side-channel attacks and offer insights to guide the design of future defenses.

Our analysis starts by thoroughly reverse engineering the mesh interconnect to reveal, for the first time, the precise conditions under which it is susceptible to contention. We show that an attacker can use these conditions to build a cross-core covert channel with a capacity of over 1.5 Mbps. We then demonstrate the feasibility of side-channel attacks that leak keys from vulnerable cryptographic implementations by monitoring mesh interconnect contention. Finally, we present an analytical model to quantify the vulnerability levels of different victim and attacker placements on the chip and use the results to design a software-only mitigation mechanism.