TY - GEN
T1 - Diminisher
T2 - 7th Workshop on the Security of Industrial Control Systems and of Cyber-Physical Systems, CyberICPS 2021, 5th International Workshop on Security and Privacy Requirements Engineering, SECPRE 2021, 4th International Workshop on Attacks and Defenses for Internet-of-Things, ADIoT 2021, 3rd Workshop on Security, Privacy, Organizations, and Systems Engineering, SPOSE 2021, 2nd Cyber-Physical Security for Critical Infrastructures Protection, CPS4CIP 2021 and 1st International Workshop on Cyber Defence Technologies and Secure Communications at the Network Edge, CDT and SECOMANE 2021 held in conjunction with 26th European Symposium on Research in Computer Security, ESORICS 2021
AU - Hamza, Ameer
AU - Mushtaq, Maria
AU - Bhatti, Khurram
AU - Novo, David
AU - Bruguier, Florent
AU - Benoit, Pascal
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2022, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
PY - 2022/1/1
Y1 - 2022/1/1
N2 - TSX Asynchronous Abort (TAA) vulnerability is a class of Side-Channel Attack (SCA) that allows an application to leak data from internal CPU buffers through asynchronous Transactional Synchronization Extension (TSX) aborts that are exploited by the recent Microarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS) attacks. Cross-core TAA attacks can be prevented through microcode updates where CPU buffers are flushed during Operating System (OS) context switching, but there is no solution to our knowledge that exists for hyper-threaded TAA attacks in which the attacker leaks data from sibling hardware threads through asynchronous abort. In this work, we have proposed Diminisher, a Linux kernel-based detection and mitigation solution for both hyper-threaded and cross-core TAA attacks. Diminisher can be logically divided into three phases, i.e., scheduling, detection, and mitigation. Diminisher is a lightweight tool to prevent TAA vulnerability. The novelty lies in the methodology that we propose enabling easy extensions to cover other hyper-threaded attacks for which no satisfactory solutions exist yet. Diminisher detects and mitigates the TAA attacks around 99% of the time at a low-performance overhead of 2.5%.
AB - TSX Asynchronous Abort (TAA) vulnerability is a class of Side-Channel Attack (SCA) that allows an application to leak data from internal CPU buffers through asynchronous Transactional Synchronization Extension (TSX) aborts that are exploited by the recent Microarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS) attacks. Cross-core TAA attacks can be prevented through microcode updates where CPU buffers are flushed during Operating System (OS) context switching, but there is no solution to our knowledge that exists for hyper-threaded TAA attacks in which the attacker leaks data from sibling hardware threads through asynchronous abort. In this work, we have proposed Diminisher, a Linux kernel-based detection and mitigation solution for both hyper-threaded and cross-core TAA attacks. Diminisher can be logically divided into three phases, i.e., scheduling, detection, and mitigation. Diminisher is a lightweight tool to prevent TAA vulnerability. The novelty lies in the methodology that we propose enabling easy extensions to cover other hyper-threaded attacks for which no satisfactory solutions exist yet. Diminisher detects and mitigates the TAA attacks around 99% of the time at a low-performance overhead of 2.5%.
KW - Caches
KW - Hyper-threading
KW - Intel TSX
KW - Intel’s x86 Architecture
KW - Linux Kernel
KW - Side-channel attacks
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/85125247991
U2 - 10.1007/978-3-030-95484-0_28
DO - 10.1007/978-3-030-95484-0_28
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85125247991
SN - 9783030954833
T3 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
SP - 477
EP - 495
BT - Computer Security. ESORICS 2021 International Workshops - CyberICPS, SECPRE, ADIoT, SPOSE, CPS4CIP, and CDT and SECOMANE, 2021
A2 - Katsikas, Sokratis
A2 - Lambrinoudakis, Costas
A2 - Cuppens, Nora
A2 - Mylopoulos, John
A2 - Kalloniatis, Christos
A2 - Meng, Weizhi
A2 - Furnell, Steven
A2 - Pallas, Frank
A2 - Pohle, Jörg
A2 - Sasse, M. Angela
A2 - Abie, Habtamu
A2 - Ranise, Silvio
A2 - Verderame, Luca
A2 - Cambiaso, Enrico
A2 - Maestre Vidal, Jorge
A2 - Sotelo Monge, Marco Antonio
PB - Springer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH
Y2 - 4 October 2021 through 8 October 2021
ER -