Authors
Ameer Hamza, Maria Mushtaq, Khurram Bhatti, David Novo, Florent Bruguier, Pascal Benoit
Publication date
2021/10/4
Book
European Symposium on Research in Computer Security
Pages
477-495
Publisher
Springer International Publishing
Description
TSX Asynchronous Abort (TAA) vulnerability is a class of Side-Channel Attack (SCA) that allows an application to leak data from internal CPU buffers through asynchronous Transactional Synchronization Extension (TSX) aborts that are exploited by the recent Microarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS) attacks. Cross-core TAA attacks can be prevented through microcode updates where CPU buffers are flushed during Operating System (OS) context switching, but there is no solution to our knowledge that exists for hyper-threaded TAA attacks in which the attacker leaks data from sibling hardware threads through asynchronous abort. In this work, we have proposed Diminisher, a Linux kernel-based detection and mitigation solution for both hyper-threaded and cross-core TAA attacks. Diminisher can be logically divided into three phases, i.e., scheduling, detection, and mitigation. Diminisher is a lightweight tool to …
Total citations
2023202421
Scholar articles
A Hamza, M Mushtaq, K Bhatti, D Novo, F Bruguier… - European Symposium on Research in Computer …, 2021