CacheZoom: How SGX Amplifies The Power of Cache Attacks

By Ahmad Moghimi, Gorka Irazoqui Apecechea, Thomas Eisenbarth. 2017

367 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In modern computing environments, hardware resources are commonly shared, and parallel computation is widely used. Parallel tasks can cause privacy and security problems if proper isolation is not enforced. Intel proposed SGX to create a trusted execution environment within the processor. SGX relies on the hardware, and claims runtime protection even if the OS and other software components are malicious. However, SGX disregards side-channel attacks. We introduce a powerful cache side-channel attack that provides system adversaries a high resolution channel. Our attack tool named CacheZoom is able to virtually track all memory accesses of SGX enclaves with high spatial and temporal precision. As proof of concept, we demonstrate AES key recovery attacks on commonly used implementations including those that were believed to be resistant in previous scenarios. Our results show that SGX cannot protect critical data sensitive computations, and efficient AES key recovery is possible in a practical environment. In contrast to previous works which require hundreds of measurements, this is the first cache side-channel attack on a real system that can recover AES keys with a minimal number of measurements. We can successfully recover AES keys from T-Table based implementations with as few as ten measurements.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Hardware and Architecture, Signal Processing

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Artificial Intelligence

In Hardware and Architecture

In Signal Processing

Citations in the corpus

Slalom: Fast, Verifiable and Private Execution of Neural Networks in Trusted Hardware (2018, background): “In the past years, many attacks have been proposed, with the goal of undermining privacy of enclave computations (Xu et al., 2015; Brasser et al., 2017; Moghimi et al., 2017; Götzfried et al., 2017; Van Bulck et al., 2017; Lee et al., 2017).”
Ekiden: A Platform for Confidentiality-Preserving, Trustworthy, and Performant Smart Contracts (2018, neutral): “Although trusted hardware aims to protect confidentiality for TEE, recent work has uncovered data leakage via side-channel attacks [18, 38, 40, 46, 53, 54, 66, 70, 79, 91, 93].”
SGX-LKL: Securing the Host OS Interface for Trusted Execution (2019, background): “Cache side channel attacks [16, 41, 68] are not specific to TEEs because they are enabled by micro-architectural resource sharing.”
Foreshadow: Extracting the Keys to the Intel SGX Kingdom with Transient Out-of-Order Execution (2018, neutral): “This point has been repeatedly demonstrated in the form of a steady stream of highresolution PRIME+PROBE CPU cache [6,12,17,23,46,51] and branch prediction [13, 39] attacks against SGX enclaves.”
Another Flip in the Wall of Rowhammer Defenses (2017, methodology): “[53] presented CacheZoom, a tool that provides a high-resolution channel to track all memory accesses of SGX enclaves to mount key recovery attacks.”
Software Grand Exposure: SGX Cache Attacks Are Practical (2017, background): “Our attack differs from other recently proposed cachebased attacks on SGX [44, 38, 19] in various ways: CacheZoom [38] interrupts the victim repeatedly and can therefore be easily detected by the above mentioned countermeasures T-SGX [46] and Déjá Vu [10].”
A Formal Foundation for Secure Remote Execution of Enclaves (2017, background): “attacks apply on trusted hardware, as shown on SGX with attacks observing shared caches [11, 46, 59], and shared page tables [61, 73].”
BranchScope: A New Side-Channel Attack on Directional Branch Predictor (2018, background): “[45] investigated how SGX can “amplify” known cache attacks, making isolated entities extremely vulnerable to such attacks.”
Leaky Cauldron on the Dark Land: Understanding Memory Side-Channel Hazards in SGX (2017, background): “Some recent studies [14, 17, 20, 31] have shown that the above side channels are still feasible on SGX enclaves.”
Privacy-Preserving Solutions for Blockchain: Review and Challenges (2019, background): “In addition, smart contracts can be run in trusted execution environment such as Intel SGX [86], however it is also subject to security issues [87].”
Malware Guard Extension: Using SGX to Conceal Cache Attacks (2017, background): “Attack from Attack on Benign Benign Benign Userspace Kernel SGX Enclave Malicious Userspace 3 [33, 39] 3 [22] 3 new Malicious Kernel — — 3 new [8, 17,37] Malicious SGX Enclave 3 new 3 new 3 new”
High-Resolution Side Channels for Untrusted Operating Systems (2017, methodology): “While preparing the camera-ready version of this paper, we became aware of recent, unpublished work that uses techniques similar to ours to attack crypto code [35].”
An Algorithmic Framework For Differentially Private Data Analysis on Trusted Processors (2018, background): “As a result, accesses leaked through memory side-channels undermine the conﬁdentiality promise of enclaves [53, 47, 25, 31, 13, 9, 34].”