Software Grand Exposure: SGX Cache Attacks Are Practical

Authors: 

Ferdinand Brasser, Technische Universität Darmstadt; Urs Müller, Alexandra Dmitrienko, Kari Kostiainen, and Srdjan Capkun, ETH Zurich; Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi, Technische Universität Darmstadt

Abstract: 

Intel SGX isolates the memory of security-critical applications from the untrusted OS. However, it has been speculated that SGX may be vulnerable to side-channel attacks through shared caches. We developed new cache attack techniques customized for SGX. Our attack differs from other SGX cache attacks in that it is easy to deploy and avoids known detection approaches. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our attack on two case studies: RSA decryption and genomic processing. While cache timing attacks against RSA and other cryptographic operations can be prevented by using appropriately hardened crypto libraries, the same cannot be easily done for other computations, such as genomic processing. Our second case study therefore shows that attacks on non-cryptographic but privacy sensitive operations are a serious threat. We analyze countermeasures and show that none of the known defenses eliminates the attack.

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BibTeX
@inproceedings {206170,
author = {Ferdinand Brasser and Urs M{\"u}ller and Alexandra Dmitrienko and Kari Kostiainen and Srdjan Capkun and Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi},
title = {Software Grand Exposure: {SGX} Cache Attacks Are Practical},
booktitle = {11th USENIX Workshop on Offensive Technologies (WOOT 17)},
year = {2017},
address = {Vancouver, BC},
url = {https://www.usenix.org/conference/woot17/workshop-program/presentation/brasser},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = aug
}