Antoon Purnal, Furkan Turan, and Ingrid Verbauwhede, imec-COSIC, KU Leuven
As the performance of general-purpose processors faces diminishing improvements, computing systems are increasingly equipped with domain-specific accelerators. Today's high-end servers tightly integrate such accelerators with the CPU, e.g., giving them direct access to the CPU's last-level cache (LLC).
Caches are an important source of information leakage across security domains. This work explores combined cache attacks, complementing traditional co-tenancy with control over one or more accelerators. The constraints imposed on these accelerators, originally perceived as limitations, turn out to be advantageous to an attacker. We develop a novel approach for accelerators to find eviction sets, and leverage precise double-sided control over cache lines to expose undocumented behavior in non-inclusive Intel cache hierarchies.
We develop a compact and extensible FPGA hardware accelerator to demonstrate our findings. It constructs eviction sets at unprecedented speeds (<200 µs), outperforming existing techniques with one to three orders of magnitude. It maintains excellent performance, even under high noise pressure. We also use the accelerator to set up a covert channel with fine spatial granularity, encoding more than 3 bits per cache set. Furthermore, it can efficiently evict shared targets with tiny eviction sets, refuting the common assumption that eviction sets must be as large as the cache associativity.
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author = {Antoon Purnal and Furkan Turan and Ingrid Verbauwhede},
title = {Double Trouble: Combined Heterogeneous Attacks on {Non-Inclusive} Cache Hierarchies},
booktitle = {31st USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security 22)},
year = {2022},
isbn = {978-1-939133-31-1},
address = {Boston, MA},
pages = {3647--3664},
url = {https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity22/presentation/purnal},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = aug
}