Articles posted on side-channels

Cyberus Technology Gives Keynote at Symposium on the Science of Security (HotSoS)
Werner Haas

Cyberus Technology Gives Keynote at Symposium on the Science of Security (HotSoS)

HoTSoS identifies itself as research event centered on the Science of Security, which aims to address the fundamental problems of security in a principled manner. Because the seminal Spectre paper won NSA's Best Scientific Cybersecurity Paper Competition last year, its authors were invited to give a keynote speech at the symposium. Given that the corresponding vulnerabilities were disclosed to Intel almost 4 years ago, we (the authors) decided to take a step back and to look, in HotSoS' spirit, at the fundamental problems. We (Cyberus Technology) feel deeply honoured that we were entrusted with delivering the talk and want to give you a sneak preview of what to expect.

Florian Pester, Jacek Galowicz, Julian Stecklina

TSX Asynchronous Abort

Today a new variant of the ZombieLoad family of side-channel attacks has been made public. This new variant is called TSX Asynchronous Abort (TAA). TAA works on all recent Intel processors that support Intel TSX, including Intel's most recent Cascade Lake processors.

Werner Haas

Bygone, forgotten, over? One year after Meltdown of processor security

About a year ago, I (together with a small team of other security researchers) was waiting for Intel to disclose security vulnerabilities we had discovered in its microprocessor hardware. We expected a fair bit of excitement because the industry had been scrambling to get mitigations in place. However I was thoroughly gobsmacked by the kind of delayed fireworks unfolding in the media. More than a year has elapsed since then so it is only fair to ask what is left beyond the sound and smoke - and why it was not the beginning of the end of the familiar IT universe, as predicted by a couple of pessimists.

ZombieLoad: Cross Privilege-Boundary Data Leakage
Jacek Galowicz, Thomas Prescher, Julian Stecklina

ZombieLoad: Cross Privilege-Boundary Data Leakage

ZombieLoad is a novel category of side-channel attacks which we refer to as **data-sampling attack**. It demonstrates that faulting load instructions can transiently expose private values of one Hyperthread sibling to the other. This new exploit is the result of a collaboration between Michael Schwarz, Daniel Gruss and Moritz Lipp from Graz University of Technology, Thomas Prescher and Julian Stecklina from Cyberus Technology, Jo Van Bulck from KU Leuven, and Daniel Moghimi from Worcester Polytechnic Institute. In this article, we summarize the implications and shed light on the different attack scenarios across CPU privilege rings, OS processes, virtual machines, and SGX enclaves, and give advice over possible ways to mitigate such attacks.

L1 Terminal Fault Vulnerability
Jacek Galowicz, Werner Haas, Thomas Prescher

L1 Terminal Fault Vulnerability

After Meltdown and Spectre, more vulnerabilities in out-of-order CPUs have been uncovered that use similar side channels. This article is about the L1 Terminal Fault vulnerability, a meltdown-style attack that is also effective against up-to-date system software incorporating KPTI-like patches.

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