ABSynthe: Automatic Blackbox Side-channel Synthesis on Commodity Microarchitectures

Abstract

The past decade has seen a plethora of side-channel attacks on various CPU components. Each new attack typically follows a whitebox analysis approach, which involves (i) identifying a specific shared CPU component, (ii) reversing its behavior on a specific microarchitecture, and (iii) surgically exploiting such knowledge to leak information (e.g., by actively evicting shared entries to monitor victim accesses). This approach requires lengthy reverse engineering, repeated for every component and microarchitecture, and does not allow for attacking unknown shared resources.