Last-Level Cache Side-Channel Attacks are Practical

Last-Level Cache Side-Channel Attacks are Practical

Yuval Yarom
Presented at the
2015 IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy
May 18--20, 2015
San Jose, CA

ABSTRACT
We present an effective implementation of the Prime+Probe side-channel attack against the last-level cache. We measure the capacity of the covert channel the attack creates and demonstrate a cross-core, cross-VM attack on multiple versions of GnuPG. Our technique achieves a high attack resolution without relying on weaknesses in the OS or virtual machine monitor or on sharing memory between attacker and victim.

[michaellee]

Thank you for this great presentation! Could you also explain the following statement in page 6 of your paper? "Intel’s hash function is designed to distribute the selected potentially conflicting lines evenly across all the LLC slices [20]. Hence, a buffer of twice the size of the LLC is large enough to construct the desired conflict set."? Was the statement "twice the size of the LLC" based on intuition or any strict calculations?

[Microcontrollerslab]

wonderful work. what if we able to find a hash function which use to map physical memory to cache sets in LLC ?