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Implementing Spectre Attack based on RSB on ARM Architecture

Sadeghpour, Alireza | 2020

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  1. Type of Document: M.Sc. Thesis
  2. Language: Farsi
  3. Document No: 53324 (19)
  4. University: Sharif University of Technology
  5. Department: Computer Engineering
  6. Advisor(s): Bayat Sarmadi, Siavash
  7. Abstract:
  8. Performance-enhancing mechanisms such as branch prediction, out-of-order execution, and cache hierarchy, have been wildly employed in today’s modern processing units. Although successful in increasing the CPU performance, exploiting the design flaws and security bugs in these components have set the background for various types of microarchitectural attacks. For instance, Spectre and Meltdown have made a serious impact on commercial processors such as ARM, Intel, and AMD. Given the exponential growth in number of smartphones and IoT devices, using ARM processors, as well as the high demand for Intel processors in Desktop PCs and servers, many researchers have tried to evaluate the security of these processors. While many attacks such as Meltdown and Spectre have been numerously implemented and analyzed on Intel processors, few researches have been carried out to evaluate their impact on ARM processors. In this work, we first present a systematic security evaluation of ARM processors, by implementing well-known side-channel attacks such as Spectre and SpectreRSB. By analyzing the results obtained from various experiments, we evaluate ARM processors security regarding their diverse microarchitectural designs. We Further present a novel implementation of SpectreRSB attack, a Spectre-family attack, exploiting the Return Stack Buffer (RSB), on ARM processors, which to the best of our knowledge, have not been implementedand analyzed on ARM processors, by any other work. As another part of our contribution, we introduce a novel high throughput and noise-free covert channel, based on the SpectreRSB attack. We then provide effective countermeasures and mitigations against these microarchitectural attacks
  9. Keywords:
  10. Side Channel Attacks ; Cache Memory ; Speculative Execution ; Cache Attacks ; Spectre Attack

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