MIT News August 11, 2022
A team of researchers in the US (MIT, University of Illinois, Texas Advanced Computing Center) found that a component of computer processors that connects different parts of the chip can be exploited by malicious agents who seek to steal secret information from programs running on the computer. They reverse-engineered the on-chip interconnect and developed two non-invasive mitigation mechanisms to interconnect side-channel attacks and offer insights to guide the design of future defenses. By reverse engineering the mesh interconnect revealed, for the first time, the precise conditions under which it is susceptible to contention. They showed that an attacker could use these conditions to build a cross core covert channel with a capacity of over 1.5 Mbps. Then they demonstrated the feasibility of side-channel attacks that leak keys from vulnerable cryptographic implementations by monitoring mesh interconnect contention. They presented an analytical model to quantify the vulnerability levels of different victim and attacker placements on the chip and used
the results to design a software-only mitigation mechanism…read more. Open Access TECHNICAL ARTICLE
Credit: Image: Jose-Luis Olivares, MIT