Are AES x86 cache timing attacks still feasible?

  • Authors:
  • Keaton Mowery;Sriram Keelveedhi;Hovav Shacham

  • Affiliations:
  • University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA;University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA;University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2012 ACM Workshop on Cloud computing security workshop
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

We argue that five recent software and hardware developments - the AES-NI instructions, multicore processors with per-core caches, complex modern software, sophisticated prefetchers, and physically tagged caches - combine to make it substantially more difficult to mount data-cache side-channel attacks on AES than previously realized. We propose ways in which some of the challenges posed by these developments might be overcome. We also consider scenarios where side-channel attacks are attractive, and whether our proposed workarounds might be applicable to these scenarios.