Paper 2007/164

Yet Another MicroArchitectural Attack: Exploiting I-cache

Onur Aciicmez

Abstract

MicroArchitectural Attacks (MA), which can be considered as a special form of Side-Channel Analysis, exploit microarchitectural functionalities of processor implementations and can compromise the security of computational environments even in the presence of sophisticated protection mechanisms like virtualization and sandboxing. This newly evolving research area has attracted significant interest due to the broad application range and the potentials of these attacks. Cache Analysis and Branch Prediction Analysis were the only types of MA that had been known publicly. In this paper, we introduce Instruction Cache (I-Cache) as yet another source of MA and present our experimental results which clearly prove the practicality and danger of I-Cache Attacks.

Note: Will appear at ACM-CCS CSAW