Cache Attacks and Rowhammer on ARM

Moritz Lipp

Research output: ThesisMaster's Thesis

Abstract

In the last years, mobile devices have become the most important personal computing platforms and, thus, it is especially important to protect sensitive information that is stored and processed on these devices. In this thesis, we discuss the applicability of cache attacks and the rowhammer bug on mobile devices. As these attacks have been considered infeasible on ARM-based devices, we demonstrate how to solve key challenges to mount the most powerful cache attacks Prime+Probe, Flush+Reload, Evict+Reload and Flush+Flush and how to induce bit flips. We show the power of these attacks by implementing a high-performance covert-channel, spying on user input and attacking cryptographic algorithms. Finally, we discuss possible countermeasures.
Original languageEnglish
Supervisors/Advisors
  • Gruss, Daniel, Supervisor
Publication statusPublished - 2016

Keywords

  • side-channel attacks
  • cache attacks
  • rowhammer
  • mobile platforms
  • arm
  • prime+probe
  • flush+reload
  • evict+reload
  • flush+flush
  • Cross-CPU attack

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