Paper 2016/613

A Survey of Microarchitectural Timing Attacks and Countermeasures on Contemporary Hardware

Qian Ge, Yuval Yarom, David Cock, and Gernot Heiser

Abstract

Microarchitectural timing channels expose hidden hardware states though timing. We survey recent attacks that exploit microarchitectural features in shared hardware, especially as they are relevant for cloud computing. We classify types of attacks according to a taxonomy of the shared resources leveraged for such attacks. Moreover, we take a detailed look at attacks used against shared caches. We survey existing countermeasures. We finally discuss trends in attacks, challenges to combating them, and future directions, especially with respect to hardware support.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Publication info
Published elsewhere. Journal of Cryptographic Engineering
DOI
10.1007/s13389-016-0141-6
Keywords
Microarchitectural timing attacksCache-based timing attacksCountermeasuresTrend in the attacks
Contact author(s)
qian ge @ data61 csiro au
History
2016-10-24: last of 2 revisions
2016-06-16: received
See all versions
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2016/613
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2016/613,
      author = {Qian Ge and Yuval Yarom and David Cock and Gernot Heiser},
      title = {A Survey of Microarchitectural Timing Attacks and Countermeasures on Contemporary Hardware},
      howpublished = {Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2016/613},
      year = {2016},
      doi = {10.1007/s13389-016-0141-6},
      note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/613}},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/613}
}
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