Daniel Gruss – Microarchitectural Incontinence - You would leak too if you were so fast!

Modern computer systems are insanely fast. Crucial for performance improvements is the reduction of the structure size and the optimization of instructions even on a sub-cycle scale. Consequently, computer systems leak: DRAM cells leak their charge and CPUs leak their internal state. We will discuss examples of optimizations that might not be so optimal from a security perspective. These examples will include Rowhammer and several microarchitectural side-channel attacks. We will see how user data and even entire systems can be comprised through simple attacks from unprivileged programs. Such attacks are easy to write from scratch within a few hours with no prior experience in the field.