[Resource Topic] 2018/1060: Port Contention for Fun and Profit

Welcome to the resource topic for 2018/1060

Title:
Port Contention for Fun and Profit

Authors: Alejandro Cabrera Aldaya, Billy Bob Brumley, Sohaib ul Hassan, Cesar Pereida García, Nicola Tuveri

Abstract:

Simultaneous Multithreading (SMT) architectures are attractive targets for side-channel enabled attackers, with their inherently broader attack surface that exposes more per physical core microarchitecture components than cross-core attacks. In this work, we explore SMT execution engine sharing as a side-channel leakage source. We target ports to stacks of execution units to create a high-resolution timing side-channel due to port contention, inherently stealthy since it does not depend on the memory subsystem like other cache or TLB based attacks. Implementing said channel on Intel Skylake and Kaby Lake architectures featuring Hyper-Threading, we mount and end-to-end attack that recovers a P-384 private key from an OpenSSL-powered TLS server using a small number of repeated TLS handshake attempts. Furthermore, we show that traces targeting shared libraries, static builds, and SGX enclaves are essentially identical, hence our channel has wide target application.

ePrint: https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/1060

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