Arxiv:1901.01161V1 [Cs.CR] 4 Jan 2019
Page Cache Attacks Daniel Gruss1, Erik Kraft1, Trishita Tiwari2, Michael Schwarz1, Ari Trachtenberg2, Jason Hennessey3, Alex Ionescu4, Anders Fogh5 1 Graz University of Technology, 2 Boston University, 3 NetApp, 4 CrowdStrike, 5 Intel Corporation Abstract last twenty years [3, 40, 53]. Osvik et al. [51] showed that an attacker can observe the cache state at the granularity of We present a new hardware-agnostic side-channel attack that a cache set using Prime+Probe, and later Yarom et al. [77] targets one of the most fundamental software caches in mod- showed this with cache line granularity using Flush+Reload. ern computer systems: the operating system page cache. The While different cache attacks have different use cases, the page cache is a pure software cache that contains all disk- accuracy of Flush+Reload remains unrivaled. backed pages, including program binaries, shared libraries, Indeed, virtually all Flush+Reload attacks target pages in and other files, and our attacks thus work across cores and the so-called page cache [30, 33, 34, 35, 42, 77]. The page CPUs. Our side-channel permits unprivileged monitoring of cache is a pure software cache implemented in all major op- some memory accesses of other processes, with a spatial res- erating systems today, and it contains virtually all pages in olution of 4 kB and a temporal resolution of 2 µs on Linux use. Pages that contain data accessible to multiple programs, (restricted to 6:7 measurements per second) and 466 ns on such as disk-backed pages (e.g., program binaries, shared li- Windows (restricted to 223 measurements per second); this braries, other files, etc.), are shared among all processes re- is roughly the same order of magnitude as the current state- gardless of privilege and permission boundaries [24].
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