Paper Info
Title
Return-Oriented Flush-Reload Side Channels on ARM and Their Implications for Android Devices.
Abstract
Cache side-channel attacks have been extensively studied on x86 architectures, but much less so on ARM processors. The technical challenges to conduct side-channel attacks on ARM, presumably, stem from the poorly documented ARM cache implementations, such as cache coherence protocols and cache flush operations, and also the lack of understanding of how different cache implementations will affect side-channel attacks. This paper presents a systematic exploration of vectors for flush-reload attacks on ARM processors. flush-reload attacks are among the most well-known cache side-channel attacks on x86. It has been shown in previous work that they are capable of exfiltrating sensitive information with high fidelity. We demonstrate in this work a novel construction of flush-reload side channels on last-level caches of ARM processors, which, particularly, exploits return-oriented programming techniques to reload instructions. We also demonstrate several attacks on Android OS (e.g., detecting hardware events and tracing software execution paths) to highlight the implications of such attacks for Android devices.
Year
DOI
Venue
2016
10.1145/2976749.2978360
ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security
Keywords
Field
DocType
Cache side channels, flush-reload
ARM architecture,Cache invalidation,Cache pollution,Cache,Computer security,CPU cache,Computer science,Cache algorithms,Smart Cache,Embedded system,Cache coherence
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
14
0.56
37
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Xiaokuan Zhang1884.74
Yuan Xiao2432.44
Yinqian Zhang394548.00