Streamline: a fast, flushless cache covert-channel attack by enabling asynchronous collusion

Abstract

Covert-channel attacks exploit contention on shared hardware resources such as processor caches to transmit information between colluding processes on the same system. In recent years, covert channels leveraging cacheline-flush instructions, such as Flush+Reload and Flush+Flush, have emerged as the fastest cross-core attacks. However, current attacks are limited in their applicability and bit-rate not due to any fundamental hardware limitations, but due to their protocol design requiring flush instructions and tight synchronization between sender and receiver, where both processes synchronize every bit-period to maintain low error-rates.

Topics & Concepts