Abstract
Microarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS) [16, 18] enables to observe in-flight data that has recently been loaded or stored in shared short-time buffers on a physical CPU core. In-flight data sampled from line-fill buffers (LFBs) are also known as “ZombieLoads” [16]. We present a new method that links the analysis of ZombieLoads to Differential Power Analysis (DPA) techniques and provides an alternative way to derive the secret key of block ciphers. This method compares observed ZombieLoads with predicted intermediate values that occur during cryptographic computations depending on a key hypothesis and known data. We validate this approach using an Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) software implementation. Further, we provide a novel technique of cache line fingerprinting that reduces the superposition of ZombieLoads from different cache lines in the data sets resulting from an MDS attack. Thereby, this technique is helpful to reveal static secret data such as AES round keys which is shown in practice on an AES implementation.
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Notes
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- 2.
Kernel parameters: nokaslr nopti mds=off tsx_async_abort=off.
- 3.
The source code of all implementations used in this paper can be found at https://github.com/tillschlueter/zombieload-on-block-ciphers.
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Acknowledgments
We would like to thank our anonymous reviewers and our shepherd Daniel Gruss for their valuable feedback. We also thank Michael Schwarz for sharing his knowledge on the subtleties of implementing microarchitectural attacks.
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Schlüter, T., Lemke-Rust, K. (2021). Differential Analysis and Fingerprinting of ZombieLoads on Block Ciphers. In: Liardet, PY., Mentens, N. (eds) Smart Card Research and Advanced Applications. CARDIS 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12609. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68487-7_10
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